
40% of Wikipedia is under threat from deletionists - panic
http://boingboing.net/2017/02/16/40-of-wikipedia-is-under-thre.html
======
kstrauser
That's what led to me no longer contributing (edits or money) to Wikipedia:
the deletion of articles I'd helped craft. There's always some argument about
"limited resources", and conceptually I get that, but it rings hollow when you
see that the deleter has edited 3,000 anime character biographies. In other
words, _their_ stuff is notable and important, but your and my articles are
not.

Deletionists are a cancer and should be, well, deleted.

~~~
krick
Sure these people are harmful, but Wikipedia rules and significance guidelines
pretty much encourage this behavior. I remember musician's (it was Asura, a
quite notable ambient music composer, if I remember correctly) biography being
deleted. For me, the fact that I was actually _searching_ for his biography
when I found it's being deleted already shows it wasn't useless. The argument
was that there's nothing that shows his significance, and relying on
Wikipedia's definition of significance it was kinda hard to argue. I mean,
yeah, I don't think he's got any Grammy or MTV awards or if his albums were
sold in millions of copies, or some other shit relevant mostly for pop-music.
It's not like he is Madonna, obviously. But within the genre he's very much
well known, and if he is not notable — well, indeed I doubt even 50% of
articles on Wikipedia are.

I tried to argue, and checked it later — the article was removed.

Instead, "Asura" redirects to (along with the original meaning, of course) to
a dozen of movies, games and, you've guessed it — anime characters.

------
frik
Sadly it's true. Please allow stub articles and trivia sections. Or was the
ban of trivia section a push for Wikia of the Wikipedia founder!? So many
great articles eg about fictional characters of movies, etc got deleted. I
mean it's fine to remove marketing spam from companies, but it's not like
insightful articles cost that much storage space, so why delete articles?

The English language version is still good to okayish. But the German language
version is completely infested by deletionits. So many good articles vanished,
so many photos and pictures got deleted - it's very strange that German
version has such a different guidelines/standard. de.Wikipedia sincerely needs
a review from international bodies.

The German Wikipedia org also maintains the toolsserver which is used for
mapping and things like that for all language versions. The WikiData project
also is from German branch.

~~~
TillE
Please no trivia sections. There's something incredibly embarrassing about
having a short article on some fairly important subject, followed by a huge
list of every time that subject was mentioned on any obscure TV show.

Culturally significant references, yes. Trivia? Don't crap up the main article
with that sort of thing. An article about Person A should be about Person A;
nobody cares about a song they were mentioned in 100 years after they died.

~~~
kstrauser
The Oxford English Dictionary (sample:
[http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/80663](http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/80663))
weeps. There's a lot of value to some in listing references to a topic.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
There's a difference between listing three to five examples of a given usage,
to demonstrate that it occurs in the wild, and exhaustively cataloging every
single time a thing has been mentioned by anyone.

~~~
kstrauser
Certainly, but what's the cutoff? Maybe that should be a policy ("three to
five inbound references are acceptable; more are not") so there's consistency.

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M_Grey
I was expecting something pretty dramatic when I clicked on the linked
"extinction event," but it's just the same thing. I can't get a sense if this
is one very frustrated person, or if this is really a worrying trend. My gut,
which is notably not where I do my best thinking, is sending up various
warning flares, but I lack the background knowledge to address this.

Does anyone here have some background on "deletionists" and what this blogger
is generally alleging, rather than this specific and rather trivial example?

~~~
empthought
This blogger is spreading FUD about Wikipedia because she was banned from it
several years ago.

------
acqq
> Look up a random female porn star and a random female scientist from those
> categories, and you'll see what deletionists prioritize. The Pokemon
> Bulbasaur gets 1800 words, hemovanadin gets speedily deleted.

It seems the editors who win at the moment in Wikipedia keep porn stars,
delete the female scientists, keep Pokemon characters, delete scientific
terms.

Another effect I've observed is misrepresenting the religiosity of the
scientists and the famous people, especially those who specifically weren't
religious.

------
payne92
Articles should be presumed useful until otherwise debated and shown not
useful. The burden should be on the deleter.

------
idop
I quit editing Wikipedia back in 2010 because I was fed up with deletions,
after another one of my articles - which I had worked hours and hours on (and
which received contributions from other editors too) - got deleted suddenly
simply because some guy thought it wasn't interesting. There was no process,
no prior warnings, no input from other administrators, nothing. Just one guy
who though it wasn't interesting.

I quit editing and quit donating money. I'm actually surprised to see this is
still a problem.

------
jhasse
I would start donating if they would do something against this.

~~~
kazinator
Basically a variant on "I would buy your $1.99 freemium app, if you only added
this feature". :)

No you wouldn't.

~~~
basch
"I would donate my time to improve Wikipedia, if not for deletionists"

------
jgalt212
I'm fine with this. As an example, practically every movie ever released has
its own wiki page. Is that necessary? At one point does wiki stop warehousing
useful/important information and become just a cabinet of curiosities (and not
so curiosities)?

~~~
passivepinetree
You're presenting a false binary: there's no reason why Wikipedia can't both
warehouse useful/important information and also be a cabinet for curiosities.

There's no real cost to keeping Wikipedia articles around.

~~~
x1798DE
There's low storage overhead, but there's definitely a quality control cost.
You have to have editors maintaining these pages which (if they are being
deleted, generally) are not notable enough to have significant reputable
sources devoted to them. As such, you can accumulate subtle vandalism, pranks
and biased editing.

There's also a search, navigation and organization cost associated with these
sorts of things. They need to be linked together, organized into categories,
and if you include a bunch of non-notable garbage it's much harder for people
to find the high-quality articles about notable things out there.

"Deletionists" aren't running around deleting things out of spite or
something, there are good reasons for the notability guidelines.

~~~
apetresc
> You have to have editors maintaining these pages which (if they are being
> deleted, generally) are not notable enough to have significant reputable
> sources devoted to them.

But Wikipedia editors are completely non-fungible. The guy who wrote the page
on some obscure 80's movie isn't going to start maintaining the Civil War page
with all that extra time if you delete his movie. He's just going to stop
editing. So the 'quality control' reasoning doesn't hold water with me. The
navigation point still stands, but that's a technology problem that can be
solved.

------
Finnucane
Why is there no alternative to Wikipedia? There exists many wiki sites devoted
to various special-interest topics, but nothing that tries to provide the kind
of wide-ranging general-interest coverage that Wikipedia does. (at least that
I am aware of.) It would seem that enough people are unhappy with the way
Wikipedia is managed that someone would figure out a way to get something
started.

~~~
colospoin
[https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page](https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page)

~~~
Finnucane
I think a site that feeds me an ad for Nazi Twitter on the first page counts
as 'special interest'.

------
microcolonel
>1\. An editor, usually a woman or a minority group member, writes a stub for
a requested article, including references and assertion of notability.

>2\. That editor leaves the project, typically because of harassment or
because someone deleted one of their articles.

Well that was a wild extrapolation. Plenty of people add a stub, don't bother
to finish it, and never edit again out of basic disinterest. Since Andrea is
almost certainly just guessing, I'm going to guess that the stats (if stats
were to be gathered) would show little or no correlation between protected
status and failing to complete articles.

As for the topic of spurious deletion of stubs, I don't see the value in it,
it would be nice to hear the rationale for the policy.

I think that contextualizing stub deletion as an identity ("The Deletionists")
is utterly ridiculous and reads as a personal attack rather than a genuine
interest in improving the quality of Wikipedia. It is clear that editors are
applying the deletion policy in some fashion, so if there is a problem, it is
in the policy. Maybe Wikipedia should send email nags to authors of new stubs.
Maybe the policy should guard against deleting articles which are too new to
survive.

Calling somebody a "deletionist" is hostile and dismissive. What happens when
you're applying the policy legitimately and deleting a six year old stub with
one sentence and a single unrelated/incorrect citation, and somebody comes by
and accuses you of being a "deletionist". Labeling people is a good way to put
them on the defense and ruin a conversation.

~~~
kstrauser
> Plenty of people add a stub, don't bother to finish it, and never edit again
> out of basic disinterest.

Why is that a problem? Suppose you write a stub and walk away. Some day I want
to look up the same subject and maybe write about it. There are two paths:

1) Your stub still exists. I see your references and use that as a starting
point to flesh it out.

2) Your stub was deleted. I see none of your work and start over from scratch.

On a practical level, what would the existence of your stub cost? It's a few
KB of text and not directly linked from anywhere; it's not like we all find WP
articles by loading a master index and starting from the top.

~~~
microcolonel
If you read carefully, you'll see that I'm not arguing for the deletion of
stubs. I'm arguing against the creation of the "deletionist" identity.
Deleting a stub article is an action. If the action of deleting stubs is
making Wikipedia worse rather than better, then the policy needs to change. We
don't need a campaign of shame and a witch hunt for "deletionists".

~~~
kstrauser
> If the action of deleting stubs is making Wikipedia worse rather than
> better, then the policy needs to change.

It is and it does.

> We don't need a campaign of shame and a witch hunt for "deletionists".

Given the lack of official action against what are widely perceived as abusive
trolls, I think a shaming campaign is inevitable.

~~~
microcolonel
Watch it work _so well_ , just like _every other identitarian shame campaign_.

------
helthanatos
The past 3 wikis of people I've read have been false; either recently
vandalized or wrong for a long time. The Wikipedia admins have free reign to
vandalize any article they want... But why? It's the admins who have been
doing the vandalizing and citing unreputable sources. I don't understand why;
have they been hacked?

~~~
palunon
First, Wikipedia admins are not chosen by the Foundation, nor employees, but
are simply elected users. Once elected you stay an admin "forever". Wikipedia
en has 1268 of them.

>The Wikipedia admins have free reign to vandalize any article they want...

They don't. You can of course discuss their edits, especially if you have good
arguments against them. You may ultimately call for a vote on that.

If they have gone rogue, you may signal them, and they may be removed from the
role.

------
passivepinetree
This seems like something worth protesting about/trying to stop, but I'm not
finding any sources for the "40% of Wikipedia is under threat" claim made by
the headline.

The article mostly discusses a stub that was marked for deletion by one of
many users who seem to pride themselves on deleting articles.

~~~
mikeyouse
The 40% figure comes from ~2 million stub articles out of ~5.3 million total
on English-language Wikipedia.

~~~
passivepinetree
Interesting, thanks.

So they're just claiming all stubs (and no "full" articles) are in danger of
deletion from these deletionists?

------
blisterpeanuts
Writer Andrea James asserts that victims of deletion are often a woman or
"minority group" member. She blames the deletion problem on "primarily older
white male deletionists". If you look up the author you will discover she is
"an American trans woman and controversial LGBT rights activist" according to
her Wikipedia entry[1].

When an article deviates into social justice topics, red flags go up. First of
all, how is it possible to ascertain the identity of the admins; do they have
mugshots somewhere on the site? Or is she just guessing based on cultural
biases displayed by the deleters?

A debate and discussion about Wikipedia is in order, but this particular
article is polluted by the author's personal biases, in my judgement.

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

------
aanm1988
> 1\. An editor, usually a woman or a minority group member, writes a stub for
> a requested article, including references and assertion of notability.

Proof? No?

So is this true or is it just lazy writing that attempts to frame this as yet
another attack on women and minorities so as to try and garner easy support?

~~~
gozur88
Yeah, that was lazy on the author's part and probably wrong.

