In an era of infinitely cheap storage it’s even more infuriating. Especially when you find that the English one is about ten lines and the foreign language one was hundreds - but now gone.
Mark it “bleh” or something, but don’t delete. Nobody prints out Wikipedia anyway.
I would say that the notability or non-notability of a subject is independent of storage costs. Not every topic deserves an article. People can disagree about what needs an article.
> In an era of infinitely cheap storage it’s even more infuriating.
Call it "knowledge debt", similar to the concept of "code debt". Every piece of knowledge also has to be maintained (e.g. in the case of a natural person, if they are still alive), and that maintenance costs effort.
That concept (knowledge debt) makes far more sense for code which is actually run (or could be run) than for a Wikipedia page.
Vs. just labeling the page as old, low-traffic, and little-maintained. Disk space is cheap, and the "backwater" page's information might become more important with time. (If only as a snippet of "what did people back then think about..." data.)
Can people stop with this "disk space is cheap" strawman? This discussion was never about disk space.
Having unmaintained articles means a huge amount of content not checked by anybody ever so what you get is a mix of self-promo, jokes, intentionally misleading articles, "1054654789764 is a number" articles, political agenda etc.
Rightly or wrongly, quite a few people seem to have gotten a bad "Wikipedia is zealous about deleting stuff to [vague emotional speculation] save disk space" vibe. Putting a more-accurate label on the situation would not help their displeasure.
Editorial-resource-wise, there is a huge difference between:
- "a decent general editor can glance over this article long enough to label it as [1] plausibly legit, [2] obvious drunken rambling, [3] some kid's knock-knock joke collection, [4] ax-grinding extremism, [5] etc."
and
- "a subject-matter-expert editor can determine whether this Korean-language article about Roman legal practices in (the Roman province of) Hispania Baetica under Emperor Caracalla (198-217) is passably correct and current".
I am not a studious follower of things Wiki, but quite a few people seem to feel that Wikipedia is really not handling the situation well at all.
It's easy enough to detect blatant vandalism (even then some are not caught).
But it's very easy to write an article which superficially looks great - nice structure, polished language, links to other wikipedia articles etc, but at the same time can be completely false and talking about something which doesn't actually exist, or does exist and paints it in a completely incorrect light.
Again, not all such articles get caught today, but in general it's a manageable problem with the "Notability" and "Reliable sources" tools. Either there are supporting sources and you can easily verify the information, or there aren't, and you delete the article.
Now imagine that you relax these requirements and somebody writes that beautiful article full of details but with no supporting sources. It can be completely false, an elaborate hoax, self promo or part of a smear campaign. What do you do?
> but quite a few people seem to feel that Wikipedia is really not handling the situation well at all.
Yeah, they mostly have only very cursory information about what are wikipedia's goals and how it works internally.
> Now imagine that you relax these requirements and somebody writes that beautiful article full of details but with no supporting sources. It can be completely false, an elaborate hoax, self promo or part of a smear campaign. What do you do?
At least Wikimedia could hire generalist experts for the major areas of science for each major language that have the time to review contested or suspicious articles, based on the cited sources or actual research. Many governments have such a public service for the members of parliament (e.g. the "Wissenschaftlicher Dienst des Bundestags" in Germany, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wissenschaftliche_Dienste_des_...), which every MP can ask to provide guidance on any question they need for their work.
Wikimedia is a platform, not a publisher, just like YouTube or Twitter. That's a little-understood, but fundamental part of the Wikimedia Foundation's identity.
See e.g. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/10/05/a-victory-for-free-kno... where they explicitly say, "the plaintiff argued that the Foundation should be treated like a traditional offline publisher and held responsible as though it were vetting all posts made to the sites it hosts, despite the fact that it does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects." (My emphasis.)
(By the way, for an alternative view of that specific case, see –
Liability is one consideration here. It is not uncommon for people to be libelled on Wikipedia, but the Wikimedia Foundation, as a platform, is protected from liability under Section 230. So they really have no interest in doing something that will result in their being held responsible for Wikipedia content – such as hiring experts to vet and correct said content. It will never happen: they are and want to remain a platform.
And on Twitter just yesterday, someone tweeted a confession https://twitter.com/aobate/status/1466101687773503493 that SIXTEEN YEARS ago they made up a person on Wikipedia ... the biography still exists today (though probably not for much longer, hence the archive link):
Dr. William Henry Farrow (20 June 1805? – 17 November 1876) was a physician born and trained in England. Farrow practiced in Montreal, Quebec and Toronto, Ontario. He is most notable for providing one of the first detailed descriptions of synesthesia.[1] Farrow reported the details of the illness, (in this case temporary) in an article published in the Lower Canada Journal of Medicine.[2]
Footnotes
1. New, Chester (1929). Lord Durham. Oxford University Press. pp. 374–376.
2. "An Analysis of Confusion Occurring between the Senses". The Lower Canada Journal of Medicine. The Medical Society of Lower Canada. 12: 56–62. September 1838.
It's always worth remembering that Wikipedia has different sorts of quality problems from conventional encyclopedias.
There's no concept of deleting an article because it isn't being "maintained" -- the article existing and being gradually modified over time is its "maintenance".
If it was wrong when it was originally posted, then that should ideally have been worked out and corrected early on. If not, then it was a case of new information still being wrong, which is always a risk with a mass collaboration project like Wikipedia, regardless of how old each particular article is.
If the information is merely outdated, that's immediately discernible by looking at the age of the most recent edit.
In either case, the way a wiki works is to gradually accumulate improvements in accuracy, detail, and and thoroughness over time. Deleting content prevents this from happening.
What you're saying is correct, Wikipedia doesn't really have any "maintenance" criteria anyway.
> Deleting content prevents this from happening.
If somebody creates an article about their sock collection, they might be somewhat increasing detail and thoroughness, but possibly decreasing overall accuracy. Wikipedia might send a representative to verify this fact, but I'm not sure if the Wikipedia's budget would be sufficient for that. If not, then I think deleting would actually contribute to and not impair the overall goal.
They said "written for". Yes, maths articles written by professors are good, but there is definitely a problem of Wikipedia being over-academic and so not being good as a general encyclopedia. I'm surprised they don't appear to have articles structured by depth (ie academic level). Where there's a relatively comprehensive article that you need at least a graduate level of understanding to read then there's an _encyclopedia_ article missing that targets someone of more moderate learning/intelligence.
If you expect an encyclopedia to be an exhaustive record of all knowledge, then yes, it's never going to explain every subject.
If you expect it to be a review of subjects, like an abstract -- as encyclopedias generally were before the advent of Wikipedia -- then it seems like something can be said on most notable topics.
It's a difficult task, it not only requires a thorough understanding of a subject but a special skill as an educator. It's a hard task.
Yes, it's going to be impossible for some articles, but if they're notable aspects of mathematics then it's worth a try.
I note that shelves are filled with books explaining complex topics at lower levels (easier in a book than a few paragraphs!?). Also, YouTube is replete with explanations that get closer to being encyclopedic than simply splurging graduate level textbook pages into a wiki (which is also a useful thing, but useful to different people).
It actually is a pretty reasonable expectation for someone not completely clueless about education. Many people in fields like mathematics or CS (and sadly also in the respective teaching positions) have only very rudementary concepts of the inner workings of the human mind, and e.g. equate the content with the mode of delivery.
> to someone of moderate learning/intelligence.
It's mostly about the learning, not the intelligence, i.e. current state of research shows only loose correlation to intelligence (g factor) and favors models that use a domain-specific skill to explain maths competency. Intelligence will certainly help, but its effect is quite overvalued.
Schools manage to do this just fine - to explain foundations first in easy language and the advanced knowledge later on. Wikipedia articles, in contrast, start out with expert-level language.
No I don't think so because these kind of things https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f8/En... were not obsolete in 1982. They were not obsoleted until at least 10 years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta) but probably more like 20 if you consider those physical media things are basically digitized books and weren't obviously superior in terms of accessibility or content.
What old collections of books obsoleted in the early 80s are you referring to?
I'm referring to a collection of introductory articles covering a wide range of concepts/objects/people, etc. Deep introductions to a subject are great, but to me they're not encyclopedic as they're not really introductory.
Do you disagree about the purpose of an encyclopedia? There's clearly space with web media to include more comprehensive articles, but IMO this should be _as well_.
It's kinda the "if I had more time I'd have written more briefly" concept writ large (at web scale, if you will).
goal != point, where point is path to perceived consumer value
To achieve accessible, Wikipedia accepts lower quality (arguably, often argued within itself), establishes methods to evaluate quality (with parenthetical comments, links to "sources," etc.).
Showing the dates of the last edit and the latest source at the top of the article solves this problem. No need to delete articles because they might be outdated.
Doesn't work - there is a constant churn of automated edits (e.g. to add language links to other Wikipedias, or to add archive.org backlinks for expired source links).
Mark it “bleh” or something, but don’t delete. Nobody prints out Wikipedia anyway.