

Wikipedia, Notability, and Open Source Software, Part 2 - EricBurnett
http://ubuntard.com/2010/03/wikipedia-notability-and-open-source-software-part-2/

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ghshephard
The English Wikipedia has a particular philosophy regarding notability /
citation (It's actually much more liberal than the German Wikipedia) that some
people find contrary to their personal desires for a more "free/open"
Encyclopedia. I've often wondered why they don't just fork wikipedia and go
build their own and see if it is more successful.

What a lot of people fail to realize, is that there are actually _two_ common
use "Sum of human knowledge" indexes. Wikipedia is just one. The other one is
usually in the upper right hand of your browser. Put high quality content out
there, organize it, and link to it, and it will be found.

The dwm people (and I'm a huge fan of keeping dwm in wikipedia, I really do
think it's quite a notable WM) were never, ever in risk of people not being
able to find excellent reference material on their WM - and isn't that, at the
end of the day, what really counts?

~~~
tedunangst
What I think burns people about the deleting isn't that the info can't be
found, but that WP is, in effect, judging what's important and what's not.
Considering the amount of crap in WP that's _not_ deleted, it's kind of
insulting to say "you're less important than this."

Click random article a few times. I just did 3 times. The first article was
good (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae_Yih>), the second two are kind of
ridiculous (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesley_Elliott> and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Fox>).

~~~
ghshephard
I guess the question is, are the administrators applying the rules fairly and
consistently, or is there some bias which betrays their supposed NPOV (Neutral
Point of View)?

Seriously, there are some AMAZING encyclopedias which consist of material that
is 99% unsuitable for inclusion in Wikipedia. I'm thinking of things like
snopes, tvtropes. etc...

The community that cares about DWM, FVWM, Compiz, lwm wm, xwm (all of which
I've used at one point or another, and, only half of which are currently in
wikipedia) should do likewise, create their WM Encyclopedia - (wmipedia?
wmtrove?) and just tell wikipedia to go stuff it.

The question as to where to draw the line is a little gray - I _personally_
think that all widely deployed (That is, more than a couple thousand users)
systems like Window Managers, Linux Distros, Applications, should have a home
on wikipedia - My home town of Lumby only has a population of 1800 people, and
it managed to get an article - why is a window manager that is home to 10s of
thousands of people any less notable?

I think every release of Linus's linux kernel should have its own page on
wikipedia. (Check out "<http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges> and tell me
that each release isn't notable).

My only requirement is that it have _some_ breadth of interest beyond the
author who writes the article, and that the material maintain a high level of
quality, NPOV, and citation.

But, I'm clearly one of those lumped in the "Inclusionist" world - which is
clearly a direction the English Wikipedia is not going.

~~~
barrkel
Why are things like tvtropes not suitable for an Encyclopedia?

I mean, you take it as obvious that such material is not suitable for WP, but
I wonder why? It's not clear to me.

~~~
ghshephard
tvtropes _is_ an encyclopedia.

Re: material not suitable for WP - most of it fails the notability clause. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notability_in_Wikipedia>

~~~
derefr
Well, it might not belong in its present form—but, since they're compatible
and cite each other fairly frequently, it'd be nice if the entirety of other
encyclopedias could exist "attached" to Wikipedia somehow, so that any
archival efforts going into Wikipedia would bring them along as well. Since
wikis are usually "flat" namespaces, perhaps as subgraphs (that is,
subdirectories)?

There are so many wikis that are basically "Wikipedia, but for this particular
topic that on its own isn't notable enough"—if these could all be merged into
Wikipedia this way, the ecosystems of both Wikipedia and its offshoots would
probably be a lot better off. The members of each wouldn't be tending only
their own own walled gardens, but rather crosslinking and cross-editing more
heavily—and putting things where they really belong, instead of trying to
justify their inclusion into their own project of residence!

They wouldn't even need to exist "within" wikipedia physically; perhaps
Mediawiki could adopt something that works for articles like Trackbacks work
for blogs, where all articles from all "public encyclopaedia of [topic]
project" Mediawikis show up in one another's indexes?

~~~
EricBurnett
A limited form of what you are describing already exists. MediaWiki supports
something called 'interwiki links',* so you can write e.g.
[[TVtropes:PlotThreads]] to link directly to the Plot Threads page on TV
tropes. In this way many disparate wikis can be wired together quite simply,
if desired. I don't remember if the software supports shared indexes or
backlinks or anything of that kind, however, although that is available
between sister projects (such as Wikipedia and Wikitionary).

Culturally, however, Wikipedia seems to frown upon using this kind of link to
external encyclopedias. If information is notable, it should be included in
Wikipedia or one of the sister projects; if it is a source, it should be
referenced as such. Any kind of 'more information' external page doesn't
really have a place in such a system. So we're back to needing to 'fix'
Wikipedia.

* See <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map> for the current list of supported interwiki prefixes.

