
Introducing Infinithree: Against Wikipedia Deletionism - wslh
http://infinithree.org/post/2579843779/introducing-infinithree
======
bane
Hopefully this takes off.

After years of complaints and issues with rampant deletionism and abusive
editors, Wikimedia has _finally_ started to collect statistics on how this has
negatively effected the quality, depth and breadth of the project.

I can't find the Wikimedia Foundation report on this (it coincided with the
great programming deletion incident), but it was almost universally negative.
Some of the more recent data collection tells a similar story, it shows that
new users, while attempting to make good faith contributions, are quickly
drummed out of the place by established wikipedians via negative comments and
rampant deletionism.

Despite this, and years of evidence that this is a serious problem (to the
point of being blindingly _obvious_ ) with the project, the foundation hasn't
taken any particular move to rectify it. I fear they will never get around to
doing anything, or the response will be tepid and pointless.

With bits being basically free these days, there's just no real reason to
limit Wikipedia to just being a duplicate of a Paper-and-Ink encyclopedia.

~~~
olavk
> With bits being basically free these days

The work required to maintain quality is not free though. The larger Wikipedia
becomes, the more resources are needed to ensure a high quality.

There is already a system completely free of "deletionism" with limitless
scope which anyone can publish anything on. Its called the web. Why do people
want their favorite topic published on Wikipedia rather than on their own
page? Because they want the additional authority which comes from being on
Wikipedia. But this authority comes from quality control.

I think some of the complaints against deletionism could be resolved with
independent domain-specific wikipedias with different rules. For example a
programming language-pedia could allow original content written by the
language designers, something that is not appropriate for wikipedia.

~~~
bane
_Why do people want their favorite topic published on Wikipedia rather than on
their own page? Because they want the additional authority which comes from
being on Wikipedia. But this authority comes from quality control._

I actually find wikipedia's aggregation and summarization of information just
as, if not more, valuable than the authority angle.

There actually are some quite interesting domain localized wikis around, on
top of the random wiki for a game or fan wiki (or encyclopedia dramatica or
conservapedia for that matter)

<http://www.wikia.com/Wikia>

<http://www.wikispaces.com/>

------
_delirium
I see the most promising line as actually being something considerably
different from Wikipedia, rather than an opposition to it, which despite the
top-line rhetoric does seem to be what the proposal is hinting at.

Wikipedia aims to be a summary of existing sources (books, journal articles,
newspapers, etc.), with citation to where it got its material, but originating
nothing; basically, the ultimate tertiary source. I think that's a useful
thing to have, but it's not the only possible thing you could imagine
building.

"True and useful" is a rather different set of criteria, and there is a whole
space of websites that could pursue that, ranging from some that already exist
(music and literary fansites, some academic wikis, knowyourmeme.com,
Everything2) to many that don't yet.

~~~
JulianMorrison
For one thing, it implies the ability to work on primary research right there
in the site. It would need sufficient justification to be accepted as "true"
and it would need a "use" to somebody even if only in the same field, but that
covers basically all well conducted academic research.

------
evangineer
My longstanding beef with deletionism is that it goes against the Wiki Way.

If Ward's wiki had operated in the same way, it wouldn't have been anywhere
near as influential and useful.

~~~
prodigal_erik
But Ward's wiki is topic-focused, which is itself a good layer of defense.
It's full of important (to us) but abstruse subjects like Liskov-
substitutability, which simply aren't going to hold the interest of the people
who want to maintain exhaustive lists of Pokémon characters.

~~~
evangineer
Hmm, that would suggest a decentralized network of domain-specific wikis would
be a more robust model than Wikipedia's centralized one.

Back in the day, Lion Kimbro was heavily advocating for something like that
using the notion of WikiNodes to interconnect the wikis:
[http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/action=browse&id=WikiNode&#...</a>

------
hugh3
As a "deletionist" (at least in theory if not in practice) I welcome this
project.

I'm glad that somebody is finally doing this, instead of just sitting around
complaining that wikipedia isn't what they want it to be. Complaining that
wikipedia isn't an indiscriminate collection of information is like
complaining that Target isn't a fine lobster restaurant -- it was never
intended to be and it's fine the way it is. There's enough "inclusionists" out
there that I'm sure they can build a parallel encyclopaedia with a slightly
different philosophy, and if (as I suspect is true) it turns out to be swamped
with useless and unverifiable information (not to mention a huge number of
vanity pages) then at least we'll know.

However:

 _[it] will discard ‘notability’ and other ‘encyclopedic’ standards in favor
of ‘true and useful’_

I'm not sure how "useful" differs from "notable" and I suspect they're just
going to wind up having the same arguments about different words. For
instance, is a ten thousand word biography of my cat both true and useful?
It's certainly true, and it _might_ be useful to someone at some point, so why
delete it?

~~~
redthrowaway
"Complaining that wikipedia isn't an indiscriminate collection of information"

Nobody's making that complaint, so that's a classic straw man. The complaint
is the legitimate information is being kept off the project by people who
don't think it's important enough for wikipedia. I recently argued against the
proposed deletion of an article on a charter school at its AfD. Despite the
school being mentioned in many articles, people were arguing that elementary
schools simply aren't worthy of mention on Wikipedia. It is this attitude that
we oppose, not that "that wikipedia isn't an indiscriminate collection of
information".

~~~
hugh3
_Nobody's making that complaint, so that's a classic straw man._

Well, I've met at least one person who advocated the idea that wikipedia
should contain any information that was true. When I asked him if I then
should be able to create a many-terabyte article entitled "List of random
numbers that hugh3's computer generated at [such and such a date and time]"
then he said it should. So there are certainly _some_ folks taking up that
extreme position.

Otherwise you're just arguing at the margin. Maybe the notability criteria for
schools _are_ too strict. Maybe they're not. I can't think of anything about
which I give less of a damn. (For what it's worth I checked, and my high
school is certainly listed while one of my two primary schools is and the
other [no less intrinsically notable] redirects to the particular suburb in
which it is located].)

~~~
redthrowaway
The person you cite is in no way representative of inclusionists. The
analogous position would be to say that deletionists believe Wikipedia should
only have articles on subjects that Britannia has articles on. You might be
able to find a person who holds such a view, and it might be right to call
them a deletionist. It would be disingenuous, however, to say that
deletionists hold those views.

~~~
protomyth
The sad part is how often the type of pattern you identified is used,
especially on the 24 hour "news" networks by pundits of all sorts. Take any
group and find the extreme or hangers on then use those people to define the
group as a whole.

------
evanwalsh
Quite ambitious. I like it.

This post is a few months old, though, and no public developments can be seen.
I hope it goes on.

------
bambax
Isn't Google the answer to deletionism?

Why should and and all content be stored in a special place called "wikipedia"
or some other name, when you can write anything you want about any subject on
your blog and have it indexed by a central search engine?

Wikipedia offers two things that lone blog posts don't: collaborative editing
and "findability" (SEO).

Findability should be the problem of search engines; the fact that we need to
go to Wikipedia (or IMDB...) to find specific information is a testament to
Google's imperfection.

If you want to publish "a 10,000 words biography of [your] cat", you should do
so on your blog, and that should be easy to find when searching for "hugh3's
cat" (but not when searching for "cats", unless you're some modern-day
Montaigne who can teach us eternal truths about cats just by speaking about
his own).

I would even argue that Wikipedia hurts findability to some extent, since it
relies on anonymous editing, and reputation builds on identity. Knowing who
wrote what is a very useful piece of information (something Quora is
addressing).

What about collaborative editing? Successful collaborative editing is made of
two parts: software and a community. The software problem is largely solved; a
working community of people who know and care, is the hard part. But it's also
in the process of being solved by what StackExchange is doing: building sites
around existing communities.

So here's what I think will eventually happen:

\- human-machine interface / findability engine: Google

\- clusters of (constantly updated) information: StackExchange sites (and
others)

\- niche content: your blog

In this future I'm not sure there's much room for Wikipedia; Wikipedia was
built around the idea that there is such a thing as "static" knowledge or
"eternal truth". There isn't: knowledge is a process and a conversation.

(Wikipedia is in fact a kind of cache for the current state of knowledge, but
that problem could probably be solved differently and more efficiently.)

~~~
olavk
Wikipedia is "the mainstream consensus", a compilation of knowledge that is
generally agreed upon by reasonably sane and well-informed people, in a format
accessible by the layman. I think that will continue to be valuable.

If you are a layman who wants to know "what is a computer" or "what is
programming", then Wikipedia is a much better starting point than
Stackoverflow or Don Knuths personal blog.

------
gojomo
Hey! This is my project, and I almost missed this thread entirely! @$&*!#
offline time!

The ∞³ blog has been thin on updates but I'm still aiming for a launch of core
functionality soon and I'm very interested in feedback/collaborators.

------
bhickey
My biggest complaint with Wikipedia isn't deletionism, but epistemology.
Stating that the sky was blue in London on Monday May 30, 2011 demands less
rigorous verification than claiming that the rulers of some state did or did
not commit genocide. One is superficially inconsequential while the other is
likely to lead to a lot of strife.

To give a concrete example, a prominent US geneticist states in the biography
on his personal website that his biological father was a highly decorated
American pilot. This is a fairly uncontentious claim, yet fails to meet the
Wikipedia standard of verifiability.

~~~
hnhg
This is the difference between saying "the US geneticist's father was a
decorated pilot" and " the US geneticist claims his father was a decorated
pilot". The latter would be acceptable in Wikipedia, wouldn't it?

------
pbreit
There are some major problems with Wikipedia but I don't think deletionism is
big enough to sustain a new effort.

My biggest gripes are that many articles are just too long. I'd like to see a
word limit or something.

Also, I really don't like the emphasis on citations. It leads to articles
comprised no more of disorganized sets of citable sentences. Somewhat counter-
intuitively, the citation emphasis leads to less popular but citable
statements dominating in many places.

------
patrickyeon
Jason Scott proposes a different set-up[1], where he compares an evolution of
Wikipedia to how newsgroups got set up, with different servers choosing to
retain articles based on whatever rules they are run by. He, of course,
envisions himself subscribing to one that would retain _everything_ ,
notability be damned.

[1] <http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2646>

~~~
hugh3
Doesn't the article say that this (forking wikipedia) has been tried several
times and never worked?

------
wslh
I was ranting about this issue for long time, really like that someone is
working on that.

------
tantalor
How is this different than everything2?

~~~
bane
It'd be great if everything2 was converted into a wiki instead of the
individual submission model it follows now.

~~~
camtarn
It depends - for purely factual content, it would work well. However, it would
also discourage the random articles, essays and writings which give E2 its
particularly personal voice. Wikipedia is very much about stating the facts
about each subject in an encyclopedic way; E2 often ends up being more about
several peoples' (possibly differing) opinions on a subject. They're both very
valid approaches, and I'm glad both can exist at the same time.

------
skrebbel
Smells like vaporware. I never really trust it when people first make a blog
and a domain and a fancy headline and a fancy logo, and write prose with lots
of "will be's" and "will have's", all without showing anything substantial.

~~~
gojomo
I'm delighted that two unicode characters smushed together ('∞³') strikes you
as a fancy logo. If you're patient enough, you'll probably like the other
design choices that are coming, too.

~~~
raldi
Don't take his criticism too hard. It's just part of the startup culture: Get
_something_ out there and in front of real users, as early as possible, so you
can begin the virtuous cycle of success.

~~~
gojomo
No worries; this isn't my first spin around the roller rink.

I've struggled with the question of whether it's better to talk in advance of
something to show, or just wait until launch and let the site speak for
itself.

I've decided to talk about the vision and general themes before tangible
launch for two reasons:

(1) With any such community-built project, who shows up in the early days will
have a giant influence on how it develops... and I'm hoping a little bit of
advance discussion will mean more of Infinithree's natural userbase can find
it and participate as soon as it's ready.

(2) We'll need plenty of help. So if the general outline strongly resonates
with potential deep (even eventually full-time) collaborators, I'd love to
start working with them even before public launch.

So I'm taking the risk of both the immediate 'vaporware' and eventual
'underwhelmed' reactions with full awareness of how these things can go.

