But Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a reference for all knowledge.
Thus, it draws the line at things and people that are notable.
Maybe you think it shouldn't be an encyclopedia, but should be some larger project that indexes every product UPC, every person born, and every website ever registered, but that's not what it is.
And the primary obstacle here isn't storage. It's quality. You need a sufficient number of eyeballs and editors per page to ensure that the crowdsourcing is actually passing a minimal quality bar. Millions of short, low-quality articles means millions of opportunity for spam, abuse, and other problems.
I was active in Wikipedia from 2002, and there was a lot of idealism back then among editors that it would be a "reference for all knowledge". Those wishing for a more constrained site eventually won the day, and they had good arguments like yours. But even today, you can find certain pop-culture lore, for example, covered in insane depth on Wikipedia; not everything was sent away to Fandom wikis as Wikipedia's policies evolved. So, it doesn't surprise me that people continue to ask, like here, why WP can't be more ambitious.
The only reason that it wasn't more ambitious back then was because they wanted to be thought of as a grown-up encyclopedia and that meant aping Britannica. Britannica's dead, no one will remember it in 50 years, but now what was a capricious strategy is unquestionable dogma.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, the only one left, and it gets to define what an encyclopedia will be to everyone from this day forward. Excuses for my it must limit itself are inane.
You touch on it, but I think the reason the deletionists won out was that Wikia was Jimmy Wales' for-profit alternative, and Jimmy Wales was the Nexus of soft power on Wikipedia.
He didn't have to tell anyone "Get as much stuff out of Wikipedia as possible so I can make money off it", that was just going to happen institutionally as a result of his clout and conflict of interest. People would obey in advance, and people without enough radar to realize they should would lose out against those who did.
> you can find certain pop-culture lore, for example, covered in insane depth on Wikipedia; not everything was sent away to Fandom wikis
But if the pop culture lore has insane depth then it’s probably valuable enough to keep, yeah? If it has a few limited snippets and very few people writing about it as sources, then it’s a lot more questionable
Insanely deep lore is a dime a dozen these days. Every other fantasy book series has one. Every other video game has one. Not to mention fanfics, especially shared universe fanfics. Being deep lore should be a reason to delete, not to add a page.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for Mr. Tik-tok from Oz to have his own Wikipedia page. He's less notable than, say, Knight Artorias, and I don't think anyone in their right mind would argue Knight Artorias deserves one.
Then again, neither does the Great Grey Wolf Sif, yet here we are.
Tik-Tok was a main character in a live-action film in the 1980s and the title character of a stage musical 1910s, along with appearing in about a bajillion sequel books and cartoon adaptations by many different people.
A minor fun fact: Playing Tik-Tok on stage was one the early roles of James C. Morton, who appeared in a truly ridiculous number of comedy films from the 20s thorugh the 40s alongside the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, and others.
For instance, I'm in a room that has a "popcorn" textured ceiling. Suppose I take detailed pictures of it, and start making maps, giving names to the numerous bumps. Would that really be knowledge? There is no doubt that it would be data.
Just because something is completely pointless and uninteresting doesn't mean it's not knowledge. It's more or less just justified true belief (with some caveats)
Of course it would be knowledge, including knowledge about how some human would process to map that kind of phenomenon, as well as his they name things. As soon as someone put some attention to some information, it becomes some kind of knowledge.
If one consider to know in advance what will be useful or not, it's fair to categorize that as fortune telling.
Now there can be other relevant limitations, like physical constraints such as how much data storage is available, or social concerns like not divulging the physical address when some threats and hurts are very plausible consequences.
More ambitious is not necessarily aiming at covering with less discrimination.
I would find an encyclopedia with exactly zero article about any individual biography far more ambitious than one that cover only some, provided it would explain everything in term of structuralist perspective and consider names of actual people involved as relevant as the names of cells in a macrosized living form.
Or indeed the other way around, covering every single individual with an equal level of details, should it be done with first hand done investigation.
The middle ground that let enter only articles about people whose personal information passed the selection bias of other institutions is the lowest ambition of them all.
The reason why this very very silly article can continue to exist is that Reliable Sources have deemed this to be notable by repeatedly writing about its subject. If you want to complain about it, you should complain to them.
Wikipedia is a mirror of the world, not an authority that defines it.
> Maybe you think it shouldn't be an encyclopedia, but should be some larger project that indexes every product UPC, every person born, and every website ever registered, but that's not what it is.
Can you point out where the parent (or anyone else on this thread) has suggested this? Or are you just using a cheap persuasion technique?
Anyone who disagrees with the notability guidelines must either propose revised notability guidelines which are more inclusive, but not absolutely so, or else accept that their position of opposing notability is tantamount to arguing for the inclusion of all data about anything whatsoever.
If you don't think that information about every UPC code or person who ever existed is fair game for inclusion in the Wikipedia it means you have some notion of notability. If so you should articulate it exactly and say, "this is what notability should be".
Of course we should record it all. How we articulate them into relevant encyclopedic article or some pedagogical book or something else (Wikimedia ecosystem don't need to limit to Wikipedia) is a distinct matter. The underlying goal was indeed "imagine a world where everyone as access to the sum of all knowledge" and not something shrinked to whatever notability definition is in fashion in this or that context.
I’m really struggling to understand why this is relevant. I quoted a section the original commenter wrote and asked a question. I have zero involvement with Wikipedia shy a few proposed edits when I published and had sources to add. But that was nearly twenty years ago and I have less than no interest in getting involved again for reasons that are even more irrelevant than this comment.
I have no interest in notability guidelines or in getting involved and proposing anything. But I would like some actual discussion about things that people say as opposed to wild claims about how every UPC should have a Wikipedia page. That is fucking insane… but if you impose insane arguments upon those you disagree with, you’re not engaging, you’re obfuscating.
I have nothing against you whatsoever, but are you sure you hit reply to the right comment?
The deleted articles aren't actually removed from the storage, they just get delisted. Articles get removed because there isn't enough reputable sources to create an article.
Wikipedia would rather you create a blog post or any other method of getting information on the internet than to host unverifiable information under their trusted brand name.
This. I had one deleted because it needed more editing and I didn't get back to it in time, but you can just edit it and request it be put back, IIRC. It's like one button click.
Wikipedia has other concerns, such as maintaining a neutral pov (avoiding the perception of advertising/endorsement, and likewise avoiding being a platform for libel and the lawsuits that come with that).
> likewise avoiding being a platform for libel and the lawsuits that come with that
I'd state that differently. The law is the limit on how bad you can act and get away with it. Wikipedia shouldn't be smearing people because it's an evil thing to do, not because its a potential tort.
This is particularly important because not libeling someone is not sufficient to prevent them from suing you anyways in any case. :) ... and focus on legal limits results in outcomes like telling people reporting serious crimes that you don't care because you're not obligated to under S230.
In any case compared to practically every other large internet site Wikipedia does a much better job behaving ethically. I've wasted weeks trying to get reddit to take down posts of hacked nudes on a subreddit specifically about posting hacked nudes and sending them to the victim's coworkers. Google does nothing about scam videos/adds reported to them, etc. With english wikipedia, you can hop into a chat channel or mailing list and reliably something which is obviously wildly inappropriate will be immediately handled. 95% of this is because whatever their flaws the site is operated by human beings that care about doing the right thing, rather than some accountability free corporate human-centipede. The remaining 5% is because Wikipedia Is An Encyclopedia, and so some of the free expression tradeoffs that might show up elsewhere just don't apply.
Wikipedia isn't a database. There shouldn't be a Wikipedia page about every single grain of sand, and neither should there be one about every single person. If you aren't notable enough to have a bunch of journalists write articles about you, then what you are doing isn't impactful enough to warrant an encyclopedia entry.
The disambiguation page of "John Smith" already contains 287 people. You're looking for the John Smith who was a US Navy sailor and received the Medal of Honor in the second half of the 19th century? There's three of them with a page already, and they have to be distinguished by year of birth. No need to make that page hundreds of thousands of non-noteworthy people long, having to be distinguished by SSN.
Storage is cheap, but low quality articles, especially those on obscure enough topics that they are impossible to verify, have a real reputational cost.
In my opinion Wikipedia cares way, way WAY too much about prestige and its "reputation". What's the point? What are the rivals it has to rise above? Who are you trying to impress?
I do see what is in it for the leadership, though, and I don't like what I see.
Like most things, its attitudes later in life were formed in its infancy. Back in mid 2000s, there was a lot of people, especially teachers, who attacked wikipedia (sometimes rightly) for being unreliable. Thus it compensated.
I think its important to remember that Wikipedia wasn't always the only game in town, it was just the one that won. Part of that comes down to the choice of caring about prestige and reputation. Other projects like everything2 did not; look where they are now.
The issue is that all of those articles have to be maintained. Every so often some insignificant professor has their article edited by a student to say that they were sanctioned by the university for sexual misconduct when they were not. That's just one example, as it's easy to meet notability guidelines as an academic. It's a problematic to have tons of biographies for living people with marginal notability. On the other hand, any random hurricane or rural highway merrits an article because these pages don't lead to the same problems.
I've agreed with occasional deletions. Without that mechanism you just get self-promotional content. That stuff still makes it, but I think it makes Wikipedia poorer to be a Forbes 500,000 Under 500,000 explicitly. It's probably worth it to run a separate deletopedia that preserves the content but I don't think Wikipedia should be exhaustive. It's pretty good at only containing sufficiently notable things. One could argue that more things should move to fandom-style wikis and I think perhaps the Pokemon are better on bulbapedia etc.
We don't have a neat interwiki search yet that makes federation work well, but in time perhaps something like that will develop.
