
In Defense of Inclusionism (2011) - gchpaco
http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism
======
chris_wot
I am the Ta bu shi da yu who was noted in this article, and I am indeed the
person who created the [citation needed] tag. I don't think the issue is
deletionism, it's instead one of a total lack of respect for other editors.

Regrettably, I probably inadvertently helped with this culture as I _also_
started the Administrators' notice board. Never have I seen such a cesspool of
controversy, beaurocracy, wiki-lawyering and frankly power hungry people. I
suffer from bouts of depression, so have left and returned a few times
(actually I was made admin three times), but the last time (and believe me,
the _very_ last time) I tried to contribute I noticed the complete and utter
lack of civility in the place. In a naive attempt to address this I tried to
propose a policy where civility would be encouraged and incivility would be
discouraged.

One of the key opponents, a user called Giano, went on the attack and I left
the site - especially after I was told via email from Brad Fitzpatrick that I
was unwelcome on Wikipedia.

I thought to myself: "I spent 2 years researching and writing about the USA
PATRIOT Act for this?!?" [1]

And I left and never came back.

But, hey, if you want to see the discouragement that an average user sees -
checkout my old user page. Even though it is a user page that very clearly
says I have "retired" (more like sacked) there is wall to wall templates
telling me I have committed a copyright violation (like hell!), or that images
or articles will be deleted, etc. [2]

Further to this: deletionism is a massive problem. If you don't believe me,
look at the GNAA article - there were 17 different attempts to delete it! [3]
Of course, Jimbo Wales supported the deletion for fairly spurious reasons in
2006. [4] I await the day that my article Exploding Whales is deleted.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act)

Note that I did this because of the following article:

[http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_10_14.shtml#10981190...](http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_10_14.shtml#1098119066)

2\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tbsdy_lives](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tbsdy_lives)

3\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_Amer...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_America)

4\.
[https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-November...](https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-November/057193.html)

------
codeflo
Among the people dedicated enough to become moderators in any online
community, there seems to be a large subset that is very rule-focused,
exclusionist and in general difficult to reason with. It's not just Wikipedia,
basically the same thing happened at StackOverflow, where all the interesting
questions have been deleted, and also in several smaller online communities I
used to participate in. Given enough time, those people invariably take over
and destroy the community.

Reddit sort of avoids this because it's so easy to create new subreddits that
people can vote with their feet if a moderator is behaving unreasonably. Maybe
a similar solution could work for Wikipedia, having sub-Wikipedias with
different rules. But that would require the current powers to admit that
there's a problem, which is unlikely to happen.

~~~
jiggy2011
Isn't that what Wikia is for?

No single website can reasonably hope to cater to everyone's interests but
luckily the web makes it very easy to create alternatives.

~~~
a3_nm
Wikia is not a satisfactory alternative to Wikipedia, at least in terms of
ethical status of the host (Wikia is a company and there are ads on Wikia
wikis), in terms of internal consistency, and in terms of content licensing
and of availability of dumps.

~~~
jiggy2011
There are open source wiki platforms so wikia is not the only option.

~~~
a3_nm
The problem is not the license of the software. I think Wikia also uses
MediaWiki which is free software.

For the other points that I mentioned, I'm not sure I know many wiki hosts
which are free as in free beer, run by a nonprofit, sustainable through
donations, show no ads, have their content under a free license and dump it in
a way comparable to
[http://dumps.wikimedia.org/](http://dumps.wikimedia.org/).

------
mjn
In recent years (say, the past 4-6), imo inclusionists have actually more or
less won on the "notability" question. Nowadays "verifiability" tends to trump
it: if you can write a _well-referenced_ article, this is taken as _ipso
facto_ proof of its notability also. I tend to write articles almost
exclusively on obscure subjects, but with solid references, and my articles as
a result don't get deleted. The trouble comes more when it's difficult to cite
good sources. But if it's difficult to cite good sources, the whole Wikipedia
model, which is dependent on citing good sources, breaks down: even if an
article were allowed, there'd be nothing suitable to put in it. There are
definitely articles I thought of writing but didn't, because I couldn't find
good sources on the subject.

In some cases I think the real fix is outside Wikipedia: if "the literature"
(books, magazines, newspapers, journals, other encyclopedias, etc.) have not
yet covered a subject, the first order of business is to fix that gap. But I
don't think Wikipedia is the right place to go about fixing it. IMO Wikipedia
makes most sense with somewhat limited ambition: to summarize the existing
literature, with references. That's already a pretty large endeavor,
especially when you include summarizing the existing literature globally and
multilingually. When the existing literature itself is lacking, I think that
should also be fixed, but not by Wikipedia.

Once the problem is fixed in "the literature", it's then much easier to fix it
in Wikipedia. For example I sometimes look at the MIT Press new-books list, or
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy new-articles list, and write at least
short new Wikipedia articles on subjects that they cover which Wikipedia
doesn't yet cover. For me at least, that "source-first" subject selection
tends to be the most relaxing way to write on Wikipedia: instead of picking a
subject you want to cover and then finding sources, find good sources and ask,
"what do these cover that Wikipedia doesn't?". That way of working has a good
impedance match to Wikipedia's goal of being a sources-cited summary of the
existing literature.

I wrote something more long-winded on that subject a bit ago:
[http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...](http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html)

------
Torgo
I mostly quit contributing because of the deletionists, but I have some
recollection about one of the "alienated" communities the article mentions.
For a while there was a concerted attempt by multiple webcomic authors to
insert references to their webcomic in seemingly as many articles as possible.
So you would get edits for example to the ISS: "$CRAPPY_WEBCOMIC mentioned the
International Space Station on January 8, 2007 when $WEBCOMIC_CHARACTER bought
a telescope and $IRRELEVANT_TEXT". While I didn't care that much if every
webcomic got an article, they were basically using Wikipedia as advertising
and would get into fights when you tried to make it not advertising. After a
while you start identifying "problem communities" and start treating those
contributions less charitably.

------
SwellJoe
I used to edit things at WikiPedia now and then. Mostly grammar fixes,
formatting fixes, errors in tables, etc. I haven't done it in a long time, as
I felt kinda overwhelmed with the bureaucracy of the thing. I don't really
have a problem with CAPTCHA (I run it on my own sites), or with the anti-spam
measures (I use a bunch of anti-spam tools on my sites, and they occasionally
trip up legitimate users). I understand those things, and hate spam more than
most. I'm _always_ OK with knocking out spam.

But, the people making the decisions are occasionally just ornery. I seem to
recall trying to straighten out some errors about Open Source stuff I work on,
and having it reverted and moved around, sometimes in ways that simply made
things confusing (removing pages and redirecting to related but different
projects), etc. It's been years, but it was frustrating, and I just kinda gave
up. I don't have an interest in territorial battles.

I might give it another shot some time. I've switched our documentation wiki
for Webmin to MediaWiki a few weeks ago, so I'm back up to speed on MediaWiki
markup, so that's less of a barrier for me these days (never was a huge
barrier, except for a few of the special stuff, like info boxes and
automatically updating stuff). I'd be interested to see if these complaints
have been taken to heart by folks involved...it's a drum that's been beaten
for some time by a variety of long-time contributors.

------
jacquesm
It's a pity that it came to this. Wikipedia is one of the great achievements
of the web community. Is there a way to recover all the deleted pages and to
review them according to a newew policy, then fork wikipedia and revive those
pages? It may be hard to get independent contributions to such a fork but you
could do a periodical 'git rebase' to keep it current.

~~~
philipn
Yup, over here:
[http://deletionpedia.org/en/Main_Page](http://deletionpedia.org/en/Main_Page)

~~~
Guthur
Amazing how valid looking the few pages I got by just hitting random page
link.

I never realized things had got so bad on wikipedia.

~~~
diydsp
It's a really good exercise to hit Random Pages 10 times.

I tried it and mostly got vanity pages for people who did something, but
didn't seem _too_ important.

One I got is about the mayor from 1995 to 2001 of a Texas town of 75,000
people. I suppose it has some value to the people who lived in that town or
need to research about it... but I can sympathize with the problem of trying
to decide what is useful and what is not.

Another one is an article on the Tigress character in Kung-Fu Panda. I mean,
sure, it was information, but the extent of its vitality to human knowledge
and literature?

Another one is a 7th round hockey player from Canada...

I mean, should Wikipedia really keep track of all athletes, all mayors, and
all characters in all movies?

I think it's a better idea to keep track of more permanent stuff and let fans
of these athletes, mayors and cartoon characters make websites about them.

~~~
joelthelion
Why delete the Texas mayor article? I just don't see the point. Is Wikipedia
low on disk space?

------
gbog
I didn't see mentioned the possibility that the number of topics is finite,
and therefore the number of new pages created per day must slow down someday.
We live in a world were the main assumption is that everything is infinite,
but that's possibly wrong.

~~~
gwern
That's a reasonable first guess, but it seems very unlikely to be true.
Wikipedias in other languages do not all asymptote at the same sizes, print
encyclopedias span quite a range of sizes, the superset of specialist
encyclopedias would be _much_ larger than even the famous ones like
Encyclopedia Britannica, and comparisons of the overlap of the English WP with
foreign-language WPs suggests WP could easily be several times larger than it
is (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwiki_and_specialized_knowledge_test)
); and Wikia keeps expanding on specialist topics (not just fiction-related
wikias). Finally, I used to subscribe to the paper New York Times and read or
skim every article in every section for a while out of curiosity; I could have
easily spent my entire editing career doing nothing but updating WP based on
each day's issue - even though you might think that as one of the most
prestigious English newspapers, the English WP would have a mortal lock on
coverage of stuff which appear in the NYT.

------
tokenadult
The new Deletionpedia[1] (kindly linked in another comment in this thread)
doesn't operate the same way as the old (now non-functional) Deletionpedia,[2]
which showed just how much cruft has been inserted into Wikipedia over the
years. A better glimpse of current practice in inserting advertising spam
cruft into user-edited wikis is offered by browsing random pages on the speedy
deletion wiki of Wikia,[3] which will show how much sheer unpaid advertising
goes on when people think they can get away with it.

The weekly list of the 5,000 most viewed pages on Wikipedia[4] (which includes
one page that I improved from a frequently edit-warred stub to a stable good
article by adding dozens of references to reliable sources to it) shows what
users are often looking for on Wikipedia. Some topics are seasonal, and others
are perennial. Many Wikipedians could best help the world by fixing one of the
perennial highly viewed articles until it is a good article or a featured
article.

Basis of knowledge: I have been a Wikipedian since 2010. I have seen a lot of
readers get burned by articles edited on the principle of "Wikipedia is the
encyclopedia where anyone can make stuff up.™" Articles become better and edit
wars are reduced when people come to the project with reliable sources[5] to
build an encyclopedia.[6]

[1]
[http://deletionpedia.org/en/Main_Page](http://deletionpedia.org/en/Main_Page)

[2]
[http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php](http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php)

[3]
[http://speedydeletion.wikia.com/wiki/Speedy_deletion_Wiki](http://speedydeletion.wikia.com/wiki/Speedy_deletion_Wiki)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pages)

[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources)

[6]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Here_to_build_an_enc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Here_to_build_an_encyclopedia)

~~~
gwern
> Articles become better and edit wars are reduced when people come to the
> project with reliable sources[5] to build an encyclopedia.[6]

'a group is its own worst enemy'. If you only started in 2010, then the
disaster is just the status quo to you.

~~~
tokenadult
_' a group is its own worst enemy'._

Well, yes a group that whines continually about what Wikipedia doesn't host
without putting up its own online encyclopedia showing what could be hosted
under different editorial policies is indeed the worst enemy of its own
arguments for having different editorial policies in an online encyclopedia.
Show, don't tell.

By the way, a search engine search on the Clay Shirky quotation you shared
without attribution[1] suggests by its top search result that the problem of
spam in online communities is ongoing. Jeff Atwood recommends Shirky's article
"Communities, Audiences, and Scale" from 6 April 2002 as a follow-up to the
article where Shirky introduced the phrase you quoted. As Shirky notes,
"Though it is tempting to think that we can somehow do away with the effects
of mass media with new technology, the difficulty of reaching millions or even
tens of thousands of people one community at a time is as much about human
wiring as it is about network wiring. No matter how community minded a media
outlet is, needing to reach a large group of people creates asymmetry and
disconnection among that group -- turns them into an audience, in other words
-- and there is no easy technological fix for that problem."

[1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q="a+group+is+its+own+worst+en...](https://www.google.com/search?q="a+group+is+its+own+worst+enemy")

[2]
[http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html](http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html)

~~~
gwern
I'm not sure how your long comment about whining addresses either point I
made.

------
liotier
If you support inclusionism, please consider joining the Association of
Inclusionist Wikipedians -
[http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Inclusionist_W...](http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Inclusionist_Wikipedians)

------
fsk
That is one nice thing about the Internet - Right To Leave.

If Wikipedia is being rude and alienating users, then people will leave.
Eventually something else will come along and take their place.

------
Animats
Summary: Wikipedia keeps deleting my anime cruft. Waah!

Of course Wikipedia editorship is declining. Most of the important articles
were written years ago. Encyclopedias, over time, move to maintenance mode,
which requires far less work than original creation.

There's also a growing self-promotion problem. Self-promotion used to be
mostly from garage bands. Now, it's businessmen. There are at least four rich
ex-cons with paid Wikipedia editors. Businesses trying to make some big legal
mess disappear are the worst. Magnetix and Banc De Binary were huge headaches.
Volunteers have to push back against that, or Wikipedia becomes PR Newswire.

~~~
abandonliberty
>There's also a growing self-promotion problem.

The entire Internet is going this way. I overestimated its inherent resistance
to gaming/doctoring.

For example, product reviews are increasingly unreliable. Even on platforms
that require purchase, like Amazon. Meanwhile specialist sites like
tomshardware and anandtech seem overwhelmed.

~~~
Animats
I know, I know. I wrote "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for
social" on that subject back in 2011.

[http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf](http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf)

Spamming social to get higher search rankings is easy, cheap, and hurts both
search and social, as blogs, forums, and discussions fill up with promotional
crap no one wants to read. I work on web spam and bogus ad detection, which
means I'm painfully aware of the ocean of promotional crap out there. I'd like
to see Wikipedia not go that way.

