
Deletionists slowing Wikipedia's growth - boredguy8
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/12/wikipedia-deletionist-inclusionist
======
pg
Currently the entries for Hacker News, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor
Blackwell are all flagged as insufficiently notable:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Livingston>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Blackwell>

Trevor's entry is a particularly interesting case of the pathology. Originally
his bio talked about how he'd made the first dynamically balancing biped
robot. That set off a firestorm about priority. One nutter got so mad that for
a while Trevor's bio read as if the most significant thing about him was that
he'd falsely claimed to have made the first dynamically balancing biped.
Eventually the Wikipedians solved the problem by deletion, so now his bio
simply says he's some guy who builds robots. Which of course wouldn't be
notable, if that's all he was.

~~~
tptacek
The rules for notability are straightforward. Subjects are notable "by dint of
being written about". The notability tag is very easy to dispel: provide
references to credible reliable sources. They clearly exist for Blackwell.

The misconception you're fostering here is that the {{Notability}} tag is
somehow a black mark on the article. It isn't. The entire encyclopedia is
under constant construction. The tags are there to direct the attention of
editors.

Your complaint is particularly misleading because the Blackwell article is, in
fact, badly sourced; it has "External links", but its "References" all point
to Blackwell's own sites. The {{Notability}} tag is correct, not because
Blackwell isn't notable (he again clearly is), but _because the article
doesn't properly establish why_.

The rest of your critique may or may not be valid (I have misgivings about WP,
too), but the main thrust of your comment here is bogus, and you should
acknowledge that.

~~~
ubernostrum
I don't think your argument holds up here, though. As I've pointed out
elsewhere in this thread, there are already Wikipedia policies in place which
cover verifiability of information and citations to reliable sources (in fact,
these criteria form part of one of Wikipedia's "Five Pillars").

And there are already perfectly useful procedures in place for dealing with
articles which fail these criteria: there are tags for indicating that
particular articles, sections or individual statements are in need of
citation, and there's a process for evaluating sources referenced by articles.

Given this, the notability guideline seems at best to duplicate matters
already covered by full-fledged policies. And in real-world situations, its
main function seems to be turning Wikipedia into a popularity contest -- prove
that your topic has enough Google juice, and it stays!

~~~
tptacek
If your whole argument is that {{Notability}} should instead be {{refimprove}}
(or whatever that tag was), then, fine, but I think my point holds.

~~~
ubernostrum
My argument is really that the notability guideline in general serves no
constructive purpose on Wikipedia; everything useful that it purports to do is
covered by other policies or guidelines, which leaves only the non-useful
things it does, like cause flamewars.

~~~
tptacek
The notability guideline supports the non-negotiable verifiability principle.
In the absence of WP:N, the amount of random content on WP rises. With it, the
amount of difficult-to-verify content. With that, the amount of blatantly
false content. The burden of weeding out that content falls on people who
could otherwise be improving articles on subjects of note.

I think something people miss about WP is the fact that, at the end of the
day, all the articles on this massive free volunteer project are published
under an encyclopedia's masthead. It really is an actual encyclopedia. It's
not the Internet. If something survives in WP, it's supposed to be good. The
project is fundamentally opposed to bogus articles; in fact, the project is
_about_ not having bogus articles.

~~~
njharman
Deletionist rational that makes sense. "not having bogus articles" that one
statement is causing me to seriously doubt my inclusionist position.

~~~
Kadin
At what cost are you prepared to hold the "no bogus articles" line?

Some of the deletionists are very far into 'burning the village in order to
save it' territory. I.e., they're so obsessed over "quality" that they'll
snuff out anything that might even be the slightest bit questionable, erring
on the side of removing things.

That strikes me as stupid and needlessly destructive. If bogus articles creep
in, the solution is to correct them and move on.

The obsession over Wikipedia's "reputation" is likewise misguided. Unless the
entire concept of "an encyclopedia anyone can edit" is abandoned, it's never
going to be a totally reliable source, and users will always have to be
cautioned to fact-check before depending on the information. Outside of the
Wikipedia community, this is pretty much taken for granted.

The best compromise solution I can come up with would be to periodically
'fork' the WP articlebase, and let the deletionists go to town on the fork,
honing it down into some subset of the working version, which users could then
choose to browse if they wanted something with a slightly higher barrier to
entry. However, my guess is that very few casual WP users _actually care_.

~~~
tptacek
I don't think your logic holds. The fact that it's "an encyclopedia that
anyone can edit" is why deletionism is a healthy force. If the deletionists
let up, and WP spiraled out of control with vanity articles, it would likely
stop being an encyclopedia anyone can edit.

Again, I think people personalize this. The good deletionists don't care about
you or your subject. It's the project they're sticking up for, not the non-
notability of Trevor Blackwell. When the topic of debate is Trevor Blackwell,
they'll lose. When it's Ketchup_salt, they'll win.

There certainly are bad deletionists. A lot of them. But I don't think that's
a symptom of deletionism. I think it's a symptom of editing-as-sport and
status-seeking, and that those are the problems that are really poisoning WP.

~~~
gojomo
Deletionism nudges the project power more towards those with "editing-as-sport
and status-seeking" motivations. Procedural games are what they like.

For new and casual contributors, deletionism forces them to engage on topics
they aren't passionate about -- older topics and wikipedia lawyering -- rather
than the marginal topics they're excited to get started (and which may become
rigorously 'notable' in due time). Some of these people will just be driven
away.

~~~
tptacek
I share your concern, but this is an argument that applies equally well to all
of WP's process. It's orthogonal to deletionism.

~~~
gojomo
'Orthogonal' is the strong claim I'm disputing; other WP process does not
create the same problem. For example, editing someone's contribution to
improve its voice/NPOV or suggest verification can encourage casual
contributors; it's positive attention. "I got something started, others are
paying attention, progress is occurring. Fun!"

Deletionism -- whether the judgment that something should be deleted or
following through with deletion -- is negative attention. It uniquely
discourages contributors and often destroys content of small-but-positive
value. (For example, it destroys the important 'first drafts' of topics that
will someday easily pass 'notability'.)

Deletionism also shrinks the territory on which collaboration can occur. A
deleted article can be neither corrected nor improved; it is a void. Perhaps
there is someone somewhere who could add the citations... justify the
importance... benefit from the partial information -- but deletion forecloses
that possibility, even though cheap storage and cheap search means incomplete
scraps of information can better find their audience/editors than ever before.

------
tjic
The sad thing is that the Inclusionist / Deletionist war does not need to be
fought at the data level - they could coexist at the view level.

There could easily be two views into the db:

* en.more.wikipedia.org

* en.less.wikipedia.org

Let the deletionists tag articles with a "less" bit all the want. Each article
thus tagged is invisible from en.more.wikipedia.org.

People are still fighting as if it's the 19th century and space is physical
and rival.

~~~
tome
It's about mindshare. It may or may not be physical, but it certainly is
rival.

~~~
dkarl
Yes -- the general public, who don't have strong feelings about the matter,
will all end up on one or the other anyway. The other side, the one visited
only by people who care about the difference, would become an irrelevant
backwater. One side is going to win, and the other is going to lose.

------
coffeeaddicted
I think it could be replaced by a page building upon wikipedia. For example -
same core-articles, but instead of just article+history versions +discussion
page it would have more alternative versions of the same article. Maybe with
some voting-system. And yeah - it would have to be inclusive - the amount of
discussions and trouble caused by deletionists is just not worth it in a time
of ever-increasing diskspace. Every single time I stumble upon a page
recommended for deletion something in me dies a little.

And why must all the articles be central anyway? Only thing that needs to be
central seems to be the index. And some common layout, semantic information
and the ability to allow everyone to change pages.

Has anyone already tried building a de-central wikipedia which works by
voting?

~~~
icefox
Because experts are the type of people who can hang out all day voting?

~~~
coffeeaddicted
The writing is by experts but not for experts. So each reader is actually
qualified to vote. And I think it would help experts to write better for their
target audience.

------
TrevorJ
You have to first quantify whether or not the deletions make the information
that is there more or less accurate. That's not an easy issue to decipher, as
is evidenced.

There's also the fact that we, as humans have a finite amount of knowledge and
it appears likely that much of the low-hanging fruit has been picked in the
sense that all the 'easy' articles have been written.

------
silentOpen
Hooray for subcultures of internet sites and factionalization! Computers have
created a bunch of strange new semi-political beliefs.

"We believe that storage is essentially free and more information is almost
always better."

"We believe that maintaining quality SnR is most important in group editing
situations."

"We believe that fair use extends to sampling and remixing but copyright
holders maintain most other control."

~~~
tptacek
"We believe that it's possible for a group of unrelated uncompensated
volunteers, acting together, accepting all comers, and embracing anonymity, to
create an enyclopedia that will not only rival but possibly exceed the work of
the Encyclopedia Britannica, and that it's possible to do that without
creating at the same time a galactically monstrous hairball of cruft,
misinformation, advertising, and vanity pages."

Some "factionalizations" are more interesting than others.

------
tokenadult
"Chi has identified one model that Wikipedia's growth pattern matches. 'In my
experience, the only thing we've seen these growth patterns [in] before is in
population growth studies--where there's some sort of resource constraint that
results in this model.' The site, he suggests, is becoming like a community
where resources have started to run out."

That's an interesting observation. The other time I have seen a growth curve
like that is observing the growth of homeschooling in the United States from
the 1980s through the 1990s

<http://learninfreedom.org/homeschool_growth.html>

to the present. The scarce resource is parents who feel they have enough time
to homeschool their children. That resource is not completely exhausted, but
the growth of homeschooling in the United States follows the resource-
constrained S-shaped curve model much better than an exponential, bigger-is-
always-better model. It appears that the resource constraint now on Wikipedia
is new editors willing to work with the existing editors. That resource isn't
exhausted yet either, but it is scarce and limited, and thus Wikipedia's
growth rate has slowed.

------
sielskr
Suppose you started volunteering on Wikipedia years ago and for one reason or
another you've acquired "insider status" in the form of admin priviledges or
alliances with other insiders. Well, there is a natural human tendency to
hoard power, that is, to navigate yourself in a position where your decisions
matter. Sometimes this is called making your mark on the world or "working for
change". Suppose further that it occurs to you to ask yourself whether you
support the deletionists or the inclusionists. Well, it is difficult for a
human being to make that choice without being influenced (consciously or
unconsciously) by the knowledge that under a deletionist policy, insiders such
as yourself and your allies make more decisions that matter (and consequently
are in a position to earn the indebtedness of people with a stake in those
decisions, e.g., over whether the 'pedia includes a bio of themselves or one
of their allies).

------
teeja
There's another force acting in WP besides deletion: consolidation. In the
early days it was harder to know about pre-existing articles on a subject.
Multiple pages on the same topic and closely related topics were common.

For example, I discovered the other day a separate page for Reagan's NPR joke
about Russia, "We start bombing in 5 minutes". Another example is subject
timelines that are broken out into separate articles for each year.

"Notability" is an unfortunate choice for a criterion since it has a large
component of subjectivity. There are many people who are only temporarily
famous; many who should be (more) famous are nearly unknown - on Wikipedia,
for example, technical people before the 20th century whose discoveries still
positively impact our lives. Warriors of all ages, on the other hand, get more
than enough attention.

~~~
tptacek
The subjectivity of notability is, I think, a canard, and it's been tackled
upthread from here. One thing I think you can't accuse WP of is of being vague
about what "Notability" means.

------
chrischen
I put myself as one of the persons born in my home town on wikipedia, and they
had the nerve to delete it... jk

It seems the inclusionists built Wikipedia into what it is today. It also
seems what the deletionists are trying to do: gain Wikipedia more credibility,
is a futile effort given the nature of Wikipedia's volatility and inability to
be used as a credible secondary source.

The whole idea of a wiki that _anyone_ can edit is so that the best final
result always comes through. And this is based on the assumption that there
are more reasonable people out there than unreasonable, so that the better
article can come out on top through reason.

But if some exclusive group does take over Wikipedia like this then this idea
of an open wiki of information where the best content comes out on top is
dead. However theoretically wikipedia is still open to everyone right? So to
take back wikipedia we wouldn't have to make an alternative. All we have to do
is to organize a counter group that's more powerful in numbers and out click
those deletionists right? Correct me if I'm wrong I don't edit wikipedia. But
if we can't do that then Wikipedia is no longer really open.

------
tptacek
My take is that half of this Guardian article makes an important observation
about Wikipedia, and the other half tries to relitigate the whole idea of
Wikipedia.

The important half: the WP I immersed myself into in 2007 was decidedly less
hospitable than the image WP tries to craft for itself. There are two forces I
saw that were dragging the project down: editing-as-sport (which, guilty as
charged, yes) and status seeking.

pg, I think, got a faceful of the editing-as-sport problem when he looked at
the articles on HN/YC topics. WP editors are encouraged to tag first and ask
questions later; there's volumes and reams and bookcases and crap-tons of
policy and process designed to handle those tags. However, a very vocal subset
of WP users will both tag-first, and also take a personal interest in the
outcome of those discussions. So if an article is AfD'd (put up for deletion)
for notability concerns, and the article's a "Keep", you can bet the
{{Notability}} tag is staying and every edit is going to be contested until
some face-saving reorganization of the topic emerges (for instance, an omnibus
"Y Combinator" article with subsections for pg and Blackwell).

The supposed nurturing atmosphere of the all-volunteer encyclopedia is
meanwhile torpedoed by the status-seeking quest for adminship, in which clued-
in editors are all too aware that every dispute they engage in is a contest to
win or lose credibility in a future WP debate over whether they can put the
gold star of adminship on their pages.

There are rationales for both these phenomenon, which I don't want to go into
(rms apparently already thinks I'm a total message board geek for WP), but
I'll just say that that part of the controversy over WP I think is real and
valid.

The second half of the debate here is over deletionism vs. inclusionism. Here
I'm less concerned. There is obviously a pervasive misunderstanding about the
concept of "notability" and the overall goal of the Wikipedia project.
Wikipedia is not the Hitchhiker's Guide. A decision was made long before the
Guardian ever noticed WP that, in order to keep the project focussed, topics
would be included or excluded based on an acid test of "Notability".

"Notability" in the WP sense isn't subjective. You're notable if reliable
sources have written about you. You're not notable if they haven't. The
definition of "reliable source" is pretty expansive; my impression is that it
goes up to and including "blogs lots of people have heard of". It certainly
includes the entire mainstream media.

You can argue that, because WP isn't paper, you should be able to include
anything in it, including a "who's who" of everyone who's ever posted code to
Freshmeat. You can argue that, but it's pointless to do so. That argument came
and went many years ago, and it's settled. The who's-who will have to live
under some other domain.

------
jongraehl
I'm not sure how it's a bad thing that 25% of casual edits are reverted.
Perhaps some of the habitual editors are nasty people, but 25% doesn't scare
me.

------
donaldc
What is "notable" is rather subjective and context-dependant. There ought to
be somewhere for all these "non-notable" articles to go. The wikipedia
approach to some such articles would be useful even if wikipedia itself
doesn't find them notable.

------
jeroen
"Its first million articles took five years to put together, but the second
was achieved just 12 months later."

"... helped the site reach the 2m article milestone just 17 months after
breaking the 1m barrier ..."

From the other numbers in the article 17 months seems right.

------
inimino
For more data and less journalistic hype, don't miss the ASC's own blog:

<http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/>

------
stabbed
baker talked a bit about the deletionists in his (great) article about
wikipedia from last year <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131>

------
eli
What a lame argument. I thought there was a rule on HN against wading into
Holy Wars anyway

~~~
BrentRitterbeck
I upvoted because I have to agree. With that said, if I were really concerned
about information, or the quality of the information, I would go to a
legitimate source rather than some place that allows people with huge egos to
decide what is and is not worthy of a quick internet search. But perhaps that
point of view breaks the tradition of the Internet.

