
The Quiet Wikideath of BBS History - drcube
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3826
======
jacques_chester
As I've said on HN before, Wikipedia is a lie.

The façade says "come and contribute!"

The actual operation of the site is no longer like that. There has been a
total inversion of the premise.

Wikipedia should have an anti-deletion bias.

There. I said it.

It should take a massive number of people to delete a page. Hundreds.
Thousands maybe. Some particular amount of registered users (5% say, or double
the square root. Whatever).

~~~
tptacek
This is a series of radical assertions each presented without evidence.

Anyone who spends serious time on Wikipedia could tell you immediately what
the site would be like if it required "hundreds" of people to delete a page:
completely overrun with spam and vanity pages --- not about BBS door games or
individual BBS's or open source authors or even bloggers, but about individual
local little league teams, bands that have never played gigs or released
tracks, marketing professionals, individual episodes of fake TV shows,
attempts at defaming individual high school girls, 6th place finishers in city
council elections, political parties with one member, "microbrew" beer pages
for each of some guy's homebrew projects, made up cities in made up countries
as part of some guy's counterfactual world history, repeat all previous
entries in this list for each of Japan, England, Belgium, and South Africa,
amateur open-mic-night standup comedians, individual bootlegged videos of
concerts, "one of the 100 most influential Chinese-Canadians in British
Columbia", individual unpublished short stories, as-yet-unreleased new energy
drinks from as-yet-unstarted startups, 9000 pages about individual aspects of
the Ron Paul campaign, film festivals from towns in Nebraska with fewer than
5000 people, repeat all previous entries in this list 10 times over the course
of a year with slightly permuted names, fake professors at real universities,
real professors occupying fake posts at fake universities, 46 different
theories of cold fusion, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure,
fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, world championship players from
nonexistant Starcraft leagues, aspirational pages about made-up video games,
individual authors of self-published ebooks, and of course, 1-5 pages about
every single company incorporated in every US state.

In other words: _exactly what you'd expect_ from an "encyclopedia that anyone
in the world can edit". The site would be every naysayer's 1999 prediction for
what Wikipedia would become.

~~~
Goronmon
Aside from spam and pages that exist merely to advertise
products/companies/etc, it seems like most are those examples aren't
necessarily bad, and if no one is using the articles, it's not like a huge
number of static text/image pages are going to be a massive drain on
resources.

Perhaps the answer to this is to allow for "personal" wiki pages that can be
approved for inclusion into the main body of Wikipedia.

From my perspective, I would rather have lots of extra fluff in Wikipedia that
I will never see rather than whole subjects being deleted from the site on the
whims of a few jerk admins.

Edit: And you seem to be defending the deletion of BBS history under the guise
that "Else spam would be everywhere!" which isn't an argument I agree with.

~~~
enoch_r
The problem with the unused articles is slightly subtler than "it will use up
our hard disk space!"

A friend of mine recently created a Wikipedia article for one of her own
economic theories. She is not an economist, and as far as I know has never
studied economics. The theory is loosely based on the work of one economist,
but the sources she listed included her own blog, that economist's work, and
newspaper articles--not articles about "the XYZ Theory," but articles about
events she believes are relevant to her theory. But the end result was a
reasonably well-written article, with plenty of linked citations (which would
appear relevant to anyone not paying close attention), about a theory that
does not exist. And because the article got so little traffic, she was the
only one editing it.

The thing is, when she linked to that article from her blog and social media
profiles, and from other tangentially related Wikipedia articles, suddenly
that theory seemed to have some validity that it hadn't had before. And
googling "XYZ Theory," which would have gotten 0 results the day before, now
got a handful of results. All of them were related to that article or her
blog, of course, but someone casually searching for information might just
click through to the Wiki article without noticing.

The point is, articles about non-notable topics aren't just irrelevant.
They're of much lower average quality than the rest of Wikipedia because they
have much less traffic and many fewer potential editors knowledgable about the
topic. They're more likely to have factual inaccuracies, more likely to be
biased, more likely to just suck. And it'd dramatically reduce the confidence
one could have in any Wikipedia article about anything one hadn't heard of
before, because you might be its first viewer.

~~~
Tichy
Wouldn't it be a good thing as that would open our eyes to the fact that
Wikipedia articles are really not reliable at all? I don't see how a fast
deletion mechanism makes the articles more reliable.

The proper solution seems to be to let the articles stay, and learn that they
don't have much weight.

And if deletionism is a reaction to SEO optimization, as the other comment
states, it is even more of a tragedy. Really, we have to delete articles for
fear of somebody getting an unfair SEO boost? Again the solution seems to be
to just lower the impact of links from Wikipedia.

------
Nursie
I don't really know why they do this either. A friend of mine is a (light)
sci-fi author with a few books published, not self-published, each one
launched in a bookshop in Notting Hill in London, carried nationally in
Waterstones etc etc.

His page, written by someone else, was deleted too, on vague notability
grounds, and he was accused of vanity driven self-publisher by some or other
wikipedia insider who decided it had to go. Never mind that the label he was
published by had booker-prize nominees, never mind the mainstream
availability, it has been decided by me and my two buddies that you're out. I
guess it probably saved them ~5k disk space in text, ~50k for an image and all
of half a megabyte a month in hosting costs.

\--edit-- this is not to say that my friend is as important as retaining the
history of BBS and other pre-internet computer culture BUT it was the day I
realised that something weird and tragic was afoot inside wiki. Before that I
assumed the only thing deleted from such a place was spam and blatant self
promotion.

~~~
Bakkot
Prefacing this, I'm largely with Jason Scott on this (and most issues). That
said:

The deletionist argument is not and has never been been that it's going to
save storage or bandwidth. (Generally, it's about it being difficult to keep
up the average quality of the encyclopedia when there's a lot of less notable
stuff. Which is absolutely true.) You should at least try to understand the
argument for the opposition before you make up your mind.

Policy debates should not appear one sided, etc, etc.

------
CJefferson
This article motivated me to go and investigate if wikipedia had got any
better.

Started writing an article about a technical topic I consider important which
was not present. When it was only 2 short paragraphs long, only 8 minutes
after I had created it, gone without warning or comment. So, nothing has
changed at all.

~~~
reportingsjr
Would you mind saying what the topic of the article you started writing was?
Also, did you do it in a sandbox on your account page or just out in the open?

Without more context your statement creates an extremely biased view against
Wikipedia.

~~~
CJefferson
Why is it a extremely biased view against Wikipedia? I just stated exactly
what happened, when I tried to make a new article. Now, you can argue that I
shouldn't just start making an article, but that's another discussion.

I started writing an article about 'C++14', the new C++ standard. I was
writing a nicely referenced list of the new features which have already been
voted into the standard, when a box popped up telling me there was a conflict,
as someone else had wiped the page clean. So I threw my text away and left
wikipedia again.

~~~
martey
Looking at the revision history of the page -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=C%2B%2B14&act...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=C%2B%2B14&action=history)
\- your contributions were not deleted, but were merged into the main C++
article by another contributor. Other articles about individual C++ standards
already redirect there - see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=C%2B%2B98&red...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=C%2B%2B98&redirect=no)

I think your experience suggests that Wikipedia's tools are not as user-
friendly as they should be to new or inexperienced editors, rather than that
contributing to Wikipedia is useless, because your contributions will be
deleted.

~~~
Jtsummers
That's a problem though, it got merged in as a blurb, but the article itself
hadn't had a chance to be fleshed out (where it could've been enough to
justify its own page) after just a few minutes.

~~~
chimeracoder
But that's not exactly a "final" decision - if the section grows, it can
easily be factored out into its own article again.

With any dynamic process, an individual snapshot (or even a few) might not be
representative of the larger outcome or trajectory.

~~~
Jtsummers
I understand it's not final, but it's offputting to novice contributors, and
the promptness (literally minutes in this case) means that the contributer
will be left confused (in this case thinking the content was completely
deleted). Even if this speed is not representative, that it can happen will
turn people away. How a community presents itself is incredibly important to
growing it. Since that's a goal for the Wikimedia Foundation it's something
they need to actively work on improving.

------
nicholassmith
The fact that all it takes is _3_ people to try, decide, and kill an article
has always baffled me. The internet isn't exactly known for it's lack of sock
puppets and mini-gangs, so the fact that Wiki allows 3 people to be the
arbiters of article deletion is bizarre.

I'd say culturally BBS' are massively important to the idea of Wikipedia, to
lose their history is to turn a blind eye to the roots of where it came from.

~~~
contingencies
Yes. Wikipedia is fundamentally broken. As a Wikipedia admin since 2003,
trying to make basic, intelligent changes to articles that are 'protected' of
late has just baffled me. It is very sad that this has occurred to what was
previously a strong community. The notion of 'notability' is basically
obsolete in these internet days, and should be dropped from Wikipedia's (many
and spurious) policies. People that spend their days deleting others'
contributions should have to write three times as much accredited content to
delete something.

~~~
DanBC
Meta is killing wikipedia. Look at the number of username boards there are -
it's bizarre. Just push a list of unaccepted stuff to developers and hard code
what isn't allowed. (eg, dotted quads used the be usable as names, but are not
any more.)

------
luckystarr
Why care to participate if contributions can be deleted at any moment?

In WikiMedia's "Movement Strategic Plan Summary" they have an interesting
graph to show.

[http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strate...](http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary/Increase_Participation)

So something must have happend around '07. What was it?

~~~
jacques_chester
There are a number of things at play.

1\. The rise of deletionism.

2\. The tendency for many pages to attract zealous guardians. I've had
_spelling errors_ immediately backed out. I expect that 99.9% of potential
contributors quit at this point and never return.

3\. Diminishing subjects to cover. All the "major" ones are done, all that's
left are the billions of pieces of harmless trivia that deletionists decide,
apparently at random, to do away with.

Note also that half the editors are under 22. This is probably why you can
find vast articles on Pokemon and deletionists go around flushing articles on
anything that happened before 1990.

~~~
gwern
> Note also that half the editors are under 22. This is probably why you can
> find vast articles on Pokemon and deletionists go around flushing articles
> on anything that happened before 1990.

Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Vast articles? No, the Pokemon
articles were purged pretty early on; look at lists like
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_characters> or
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_%28202%E2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_%28202%E2%80%93251%29)
which devote a few lines to main characters or major pokemon, and just compare
some with their respective entries in Bulbapedia (where the Pokemon Wikipedia
editors ultimately fled to escape the deletionists, much like the Star Wars
editors earlier fled en masse to Wookieepedia).

Even the Pikachu article has been eviscerated:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikachu> (Hope you enjoy a list of awards and
mentions... It's 'out of universe' material donchaknow)

~~~
jacques_chester
Good point, they reduced it to _only_ thousands upon thousands of words
_enumerating every single character that has ever appeared_.

Phew, what a useful compromise. Good work team. High fives all round.

~~~
Dylan16807
Of all the things to complain about, you're going after the fact that
wikipedia has 15 printed pages about important characters in a cartoon with
over 750 episodes? This is a list of important, plot-affecting characters;
you're just failing to appreciate the sheer scale.

At the very least complain about the species list if you want something ill-
fitting for an encyclopedia.

~~~
jacques_chester
The point is that "notability" seems to be a 1-to-1 proxy for "the popular
culture and nostalgic recollections of < 25 year olds".

Which is ... daft.

~~~
Dylan16807
That's a fine point but a bad example. We're looking at a couple dozen words
about characters per _hour_ of footage.

------
drcube
Is Wiki server space scarce? I should be able to post an article about the
tree in my back yard if I want. "Notability" is simply not something an online
encyclopedia should be worried about.

Not that BBS history isn't notable. I'm just saying it would be wrong to
delete it even if it wasn't.

~~~
riffraff
while I'd like the "everything inside wikipedia" approach to work, the problem
with it is that every new page makes it less maintainable, disambiguation
pages grow larger, category listings grow larger, search results and
suggestions multiply etc.

And the notability argument is that you can already post an article about that
tree, on the larger internet.

~~~
Goronmon
_while I'd like the "everything inside wikipedia" approach to work, the
problem with it is that every new page makes it less maintainable,
disambiguation pages grow larger, category listings grow larger, search
results and suggestions multiply etc._

This argument doesn't seem helpful. All of those problems will continue to
exist regardless of whether some articles pass the "Notability" requirement or
not.

~~~
riffraff
absolutely, I see it as a band aid measure, but that doesn't mean it's void of
usefulness.

------
Udo
Every time this comes up I'm reminded of a very simple idea: fork Wikipedia,
in a way that articles still get synced from the original but at the same time
deleted articles just stay in the database. If you want to make it really
fancy, put in some code that tries to detect whether _parts_ of an article
have been deleted and, when in doubt, keep the old version it live. Maybe
there could even be some neat UI that makes it easy to navigate different
versions of articles (no, the Wikipedia UI isn't it). I think in time a
project like that could become very successful. Keep using Wikipedia as a
source, but give new life to the underlying idea that is no longer being taken
seriously over there.

~~~
aw3c2
a killer feature for me would be coloring text in articles by its age. under
the assumption that old = unchanged = good. might be interesting.

~~~
maxerickson
Here are some people fooling with history visualization:

<http://waxy.org/2005/06/wikipedia_histo/>

(I have no idea if anything still works, just had some vague memory of it
floating around)

------
raverbashing
Wikipedia seem to "suffer" from the same issues that plague Google making
their "community" do their support for them

In essence, the "most popular" community members think they own the services,
not only because of unchecked "work"

~~~
cmccabe
Do you "think" you could "use" more "quotes" in your "post"?

------
topbanana
It appears to me that Wikipedia needs to come up with a measure of notability
for each article - NotabilityRank if you will.

An arbitrary watermark is bound to cause all sorts of issues

------
Uchikoma
"... the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." but we can delete what we
want.

------
apaprocki
Tangentially related, I've suffered a quiet death of my own BBS history
because nearly a decade of 90's data is jailed on old 250MB+ QIC tape backups
that were recorded with various unknown programs running from DOS to Win
3.1/95 days. Has anyone had a positive experience with using a service to
migrate data from media this old and unknown backup programs at a _reasonable_
cost?

~~~
djt
The author of the article runs an archive service. He might be happy to do it
for free and send you a copy?

------
languagehacker
I'm assuming someone may have already said this, but content isn't locked into
Wikipedia. It's Creative Commons-licensed, meaning that if someone cared about
curating and maintaining this history, they could have moved those articles
over to another wiki. There are even wiki hosting solutions that make these
kind of moves relatively easy.

The problem is not that the Wikipedia community was curating their content,
but that that batch of content was not being actively curated by someone. This
is how history works. Someone has to determine something notable and worth
preserving. If no one stands up for a piece of content, then it eventually
dissipates into the ether.

~~~
nollidge
> Someone has to determine something notable and worth preserving. If no one
> stands up for a piece of content, then it eventually dissipates into the
> ether.

His entire point is that this process is broken and heavily biased against the
person who wishes to stand up for the content. Did you have a specific reason
why he's wrong about that?

~~~
languagehacker
My point is more that if the community has an issue with the content, then
take it someplace else. There are more wikis than Wikipedia. If you imagine
that all knowledge in the world is a library, then Wikipedia is only the two
or three shelves of big, heavy encyclopedias. If you don't think there's a
wiki for your domain, then start one.

------
afterburner
Let Wikipedia be some weirdly curated thing that is often useful but not the
primary source for everything. I agree wholeheartedly with the article: if you
care about something, cover it and protect it separately from Wikipedia. It'll
get found through search anyways.

~~~
chc
> _It'll get found through search anyways._

If I could actually make this guarantee for any page I created, I would be
richer than Gates.

~~~
afterburner
It'll get found by anyone who's looking for it... that, anyone can do.

~~~
chc
Looking for that specific page, which they already know about? Sure, they'll
just enter the URL or click the bookmark.

Looking for some page containing similar keywords to mine? Again, if I could
reliably cause people with relevant interests to come to any page I create,
I'd be in a great place financially. I'd just start an online poker site, then
go out and buy myself a pony made of diamonds.

------
nuckin-futz
Perhaps not what you were hoping for, yet never-the-less: its up to - you -
Mr. Scott. Keep your remembrances of that era alive at your site. If not you,
who will?

------
nerfhammer
wikipedia should be like github. I should be able to clone it, write whatever
I want in my branch, and you can merge it into your branch if you want, or not
if you don't. End of story.

------
jQueryIsAwesome
Its a noise to signal ratio problem; when you search for any person you don't
want a list of one thousand people; you probably want to read about the few
popularly know ones. Same thing happens with acronyms, dates and
abbreviations.

Plus the big problem of sources curation, those are more unreliable in
unpopular articles for the lack of eyeballs on them. The amount of work mods
have to do would grow exponentially if they didn't take notability into
account.

Of course Wikipedia could do better, but it is a hard problem, not an easy
one.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _Its a noise to signal ratio problem; when you search for any person you
> don't want a list of one thousand people; you probably want to read about
> the few popularly know ones. Same thing happens with acronyms, dates and
> abbreviations._

Just recently (only last century) some clever fellows came up with a workable
solution for this. Look up www.google.com in your web browser and see if works
for you.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
They came out for a solution for themselves, or do you happen to have the link
to their github repo? Otherwise you may want to donate a few million dollars
so they can come out with a similar solution.

~~~
jacques_chester
Sarcasm doesn't work like it used to.

My point

Wikipedia is an "encyclopedia anyone can edit".

Google aims to "index all the world's information".

These are _different_ but _complementary_ goals.

That the Wikimedia Foundation hasn't improved a user interface that was
slapped together in the early 2000s is not somehow a mathematical, universal
constraint on the growth of the subjects that are covered. It just isn't.

I am prepared to bet honest folding money that almost nobody uses the internal
mechanisms of search and navigation that Wikipedia provides. Apart from
clicking an in-text link referring to another subject, I am prepared to bet
that traffic to Wikipedia is dominated by search engine referrals by at least
one order of magnitude. Probably two.

Google so dominates the _actual usage_ of Wikipedia that it is _ridiculous_ to
advance the poor UI of the Wikipedia platform as some kind of serious argument
in favour of deletionism.

It'd be like walking into a library circa 1950 and saying "All these index
cards are a schlep, let's start throwing away books".

You'd be committed to a loony bin. And now we have unlimited search and
retrieval capability and you suppose that a poor interface _is the killer blow
for deletionism?_

I believe I am having a Mugatu Moment here.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
"Use google please, our searching and listing algorithm is not as good as
theirs".

Most people don't return to Google after the initial access to the website,
they keep using the Wikipedia interface when they need to search related
subjects.

And I will surely throw away some books from the library if random people were
allowed to put their books in there.

And the killer blow is the second part.

~~~
jacques_chester
... huh?

Edit: since you added this --

> _Most people don't return to Google after the initial access to the website,
> they keep using the Wikipedia interface when they need to search related
> subjects._

I'll bet you $100, AUD or USD, to be donated to the charity of your choice,
that this is not so, by a factor of at least 10 to 1.

As I said, this does not include following links in articles. I am talking
about the wikipedia search engine and category pages. I am talking about
search engines generally, though I expect google to be the dominant one.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
I will gladly accept the bet if you can find a trustful way of getting that
data, because honestly I can't think about one.

And you overall do have a point, but is not as strong as you think it is.

~~~
stephenhuey
How are you so sure most people don't return to Google? I do it more than half
the time, and just add Wikipedia as a search term to narrow the results. For
years I've felt it made my search more fruitful than using Wikipedia's search.
Maybe my feelings are wrong, but if I feel this way, then a lot of other
people could, too!

~~~
gojomo
You can tell from auto-complete many people add 'wiki' or 'wikipedia' to
searches at Google. And with the growth of Google-search-from-browser fields,
I would also strongly expect that most people who type reformulated queries
during an extended Wikipedia session do so through Google, not Wikipedia's
much weaker onsite search.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
A little test show otherwise: <http://imgur.com/hBuzt> (Unlogged-in /
Cookieless)

Perhaps is related to the kind of subjects you are searching for; or it may
just personalization by google.

Or maybe we are both biased for ultimately silly reasons and the truth lies
somewhere in the middle but the lack of available data reduces everything to
mere speculation.

~~~
gojomo
This 'little test' on 3 arbitrary early-20th-century historical names, only
looking at the top 4 suggestions, doesn't 'show otherwise'. I said 'many
people', not 'most'.

Turn off 'instant' so you see the top 10 autocompletions, and watch over all
your queries. You will very often see "wiki" as a suggested suffix.

Or better yet, just add " w" to the end of any of your own tests: " wiki" will
be the top suggestion, which demonstrates that 'many' people add it as a
suffix on Google.

Everything on this question is not reduced to bias and 'mere speculation'.
I've observed many peoples' search behavior, not just my own, and habitual
recourse to browser-based search boxes or always-requery-at-Google is growing
over time (especially with the rise of Chrome and its 'onebox').

Wikipedia also did usability studies in the 2009-2010 timeframe, from which
Wikimedia director/developer Erik Moeller reported: "our test subjects tended
to resort to common web search engines to navigate Wikipedia instead of using
the site’s own search" [1]. (Wikipedia has since moved the site search box to
help it be found, and I suspect that's boosted its use, but it's still subtle
compared to the always-available, always-familiar in-browser Google-powered
search.)

[1] [http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/06/15/usability-why-did-we-
mo...](http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/06/15/usability-why-did-we-move-the-
search-box/)

------
IheartApplesDix
Wasn't there an article on HN recently about fishing old games for gaming
concepts? I wonder if someone took up that idea and thought that the next best
course of action was to conceal their source before blatantly ripping off
every classic game mechanic from the last 30 years? After all "Good Artists
Borrow, Great Artists Steal" I really can't imagine any other reason to target
BBS games specifically. Also, the deleter happens to be a programmer as well.

/conspiracy

