This is spot on. I had to engage in a battle on Wikipedia to keep the page up for dream hampton. Not everyone knows who she is, but she was the editor for The Source at one time, and ghost wrote Jay-Z's autobiography, among other things.

What I ran into is that Wikipedia basically demands that you get published in these megacorp publications that are basically all run by rich white people, and mostly men. So being written about in black publications, which tend to be more magazines and online publications, and less Library of Congress kind of stuff, doesn't cut it according to Wikipedia's notability "guidelines". If the white editors don't recognize the publication names, they don't "count".

The fact is, if she had been editor of Rolling Stone, I don't think there would've been a problem.

There were other factors too... being an editor and ghostwriter means she's more behind the scenes, and less likely to get outright exposure in the press. But that, too, is a requirement that I think turns Wikipedia into an amplifier of power, rather than a distributor of one.

I'm not sure if there was some outright racism going on too. I mean, she was mentioned in the New York Times and people were still calling for her page removal. At that point things start to get a little murky for me. But the situation was fishy for sure.

My reading of the relevant Wikiepedia rules/policies suggests to me that there is a fair amount of leeway in these decisions and I would have thought that a reasonable approach would be to err on the side of inclusion, not on the side of deletion.

they're working on improving the gender balance, but i suspect that the format will still retain this skew simply due to societal/demographic reasons.

I don't know that that means that there was any overt or covert racism, but there is definitely a contributor bias :P

† upon further investigation i have not been able to find references to racial demographics for wikipedia. Consider this hearsay.

When an all/mostly black country invents something like the Internet, and then creates a website like Wikipedia, and then most of the nerds it attracts to administrate it happen to be black male nerds, then, yes, you'll see a different demographic mix. But until that happens, you'll see demographic trends that are likely (and reasonably) going to be heavily influenced by their starting conditions.

I wish you had considered the route of getting involved instead. There are just some basic, fundamental things that would help fix this. A modification to the notability rules would require a lot less effort than your other proposals. The notability rules work pretty well for kicking out useless chaff like pages about high school garage bands that have never played a show. But they do privilege old-school publishing and broadcasting, so particularly ephemeral creations like new programming languages may fare very poorly against the notability criteria. But this strikes me as fixable.

Programmers can help too. We don't even have the capability, for instance, for people to be emailed when their favorite page is up for deletion. We don't have a lot of means for casual involvement; everything depends on logging into Wikipedia regularly. This is part of why battles in Wikipedia tend to be won by the most, shall we say, persistent.

I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, as a programmer. In general our resources are stretched pretty thin, and there's really only been two years so far of a budget that's even remotely in line with the size and impact of the site (thanks to your contributions). In a lot of ways we're still playing catchup with an explosive period of growth that happened around 2006-2007, using technology that's getting a bit venerable.

But the issue of deletionism and the general community demeanor is a problem that is occupying more and more of our attention. If it matters to you then contact me. I can definitely tell you there are lots and LOTS of ways to help out.

Actually you could even get PAID to fix this problem. Want a job working here? We have lots of open technical positions. http://bit.ly/WikimediaJobs

The one thing I can't guarantee is that it will satisfy your need to rage. The truth is, almost everyone in the Wiki community is acting in good faith. What they need are a) your input as a knowledgeable person about how policies need to change, and b) your technical and design skills, to create systems that avoid these communication breakdowns, and guide volunteers to be more effective.

If Zed's article means someone at the Wikimedia Foundation finally understands the problem, fantastic!

First thing you do, please kill all of the rules lawyers (and maybe get some machine learning in there to clean up spam and pause edit wars, rather than relying on fallible humans with obvious agendas).

Till then, one can only hope that Zed's fork of Wikipedia gives it an incentive to move in an inclusionist direction. Perhaps a fork oriented around Facebook Connect, such that people edit with their real names and have property rights over their pages (Knol hasn't really properly executed on the idea, though it's been around for a while).

   I'm pretty sure next year when Wikipedia start asking for donations I'm going to come out strong and campaign against them.

Wikimedia person, you guys do a lot of A/B testing of your donation pages. Why not put something in there asking how many donors actually favor deletionism? I think you'll be surprised how many people have been turned off by it.

Just include it all and let search (and writer reputation) sort it out.

And your donations have made that research possible.

I personally have had some idiot with a vendetta get a page about me deleted numerous times despite me having been mentioned in about 10 trade and mass publications and having a book published (now two) as well as my own articles in the press. It was baffling that a single person can get a page deleted without any warning, flagging, or attempts to do some research.

But really it comes down to trust. I don't trust any organization that begs me for money then deletes the content that matters to me most and tries to hide behind some bogus "well it's not us really (tee-hee)". Either Wikimedia is in charge or they silently allow this kind of crap.

Finally, the issue of deletionism is purely the result of bad usability and structure. All you need to do is make a place to put these pages rather than delete them and you'll solve tons of problems.

Do you really want the Wikimedia Foundation to set themselves up as a judge of the content in Wikipedia? I mean, apart from the fact that we have no mandate or qualifications to do this, how could you get an organization that fits around a few tables in a restaurant to judge all the edit wars in Wikipedia? In over 250 languages?!

If this problem is going to be solved, it's going to be solved in some distributed fashion, by the community, or by interested hackers such as yourself pitching in and giving the community new tools. There's a good chance you (by which I mean any hacker reading this) could get PAID to solve this problem.

Or, it's going to be solved by someone forking Wikipedia content or starting over, but the same problems have to be solved somehow.

I will give you $1000 of my own money if you come out with a Wikipedia clone or fork that works better than the current version, particularly with regards to the issues you have difficulty with. Or even a prototype!

I don't have this kind of money to throw around, mostly because I work for Wikimedia. ;) But I'm pretty confident I won't have to pay it out. You aren't going to do shit one way or another. You talk big about how you could do it better. But I see you backing off when I am begging you to actually do something about it.

Only caveat, it's gotta be 100% open source (GPL compatible license) so I can copy its features back into Wikipedia if they seem to be working, or are generally good ideas. If you like we can find a mutually respected person to arbitrate on whether your version is better or not.

The idea of deletionism to me is actually contrary to how the internet has developed, and is an anachronism due to the era and principles in which wikipedia was founded. The internet everywhere else outside of wikipedia's curated boundaries are defined by relevance as a filter upon what is assumed to be a limitless pile of results. There is no need to delete anything because being on the last page is equivalent (for everyone else who doesn't care) to not existing.

As such, it is my opinion that wikipedia's problem with deletionism is primarily a social one. Why not just sort pages based on a page-rank type model and curate based on that? (i would hope you guys are already doing that, and i will assume wikipedians are doing that)

Futhermore, i dislike and resent the notion that if something out in the world is wrong, you have to either drop everything and fix it, or stfu. This has always been a pernicious meme in the Open Source Community. There are constraints on people's time and resources. You know it, I know it. To call them names, or impugn their character because of it isn't fair. You 'begging' Zed (or anyone else) to fix wikipedia's problems or acquese to your accusations of being full of hot air is neither fair nor intended to encourage improvements in wikipedia or Zed's behavior.

People should be able to point out things that don't make sense, or aren't fair without being told that they're wrong to point out what they perceive as unjust.

Lastly, don't give into Zed's crazy alpha-male hierarchy dominance thing. Daring him to contribute to wikipedia isn't going to compel him, nor does it make him look like he's backing down. It makes you look like a jerk (even if you think he too is being a jerk).

Perhaps it sounded like I was defending deletionism, but I meant to do the opposite. I was trying to say we lack the appropriate tools and policies. This is a huge problem. Zed is right to be exercised, even enraged about it.

As someone who thinks about this problem all day, and who works with people who think about this problem all day, I resent the implication that I'm part of a deletionist conspiracy. This is the polar opposite of what everybody at the WMF that I know is trying to do.

However, as I pointed out, there also are constraints on what the central organization can do (or ought to do). We need more people willing to fight these negative tendencies in the community, to set new norms and policies.

I understand that Zed and others may feel it's a bit weird to give money to the WMF because of the good parts of Wikipedia, but then for the WMF not to take responsibility for the bad. It's a strange relationship, for sure -- really the WMF just keeps the lights on, and maintains the software, and the community writes the encyclopedia. The community, for its part, doesn't want to be taken over by some central administration either. But the WMF can allocate resources. (My feeling is you'll see more and more resources allocated specifically to combat these usability and community interaction problems.)

In the meantime, I don't feel bad for calling attention to the ways that others can help out.

> Lastly, don't give into Zed's crazy alpha-male hierarchy dominance thing.

You're right. I got angry and did not represent my point well. I apologize to HN.

I've talked to a few people who work at WMF (mainly at SxSWi last year) about deletionism and the WMF, and i definitely distinguish between the policies, the contributors implementing them and the WMF. My main point in discussing the issue was simply to explain why i thought your previous post was on the disingenuous side.

What i don't see a lot of, either though, is discussion about what are alternative models that can avoid conflicts like this that flair up. So it's mainly just two groups of people who are angry at each other and shouting, rather than a meaningful discussion either about the way that wikipedia functions, or about the particular subject matter being administrated.

Does the WMF have a blog, mailing list, or some sort of place where technical stuff, or things about how tools interact w/ the community are discussed?

Additionally, i think that it is definitely possible for 3rd parties to look at wikipedia and things that can be done to improve it from the outside, and that the WMF could encourage them both actively and passively (i know you guys have done a bunch of things like providing dumps of wikipedia and api access and all that).

Does the WMF have (code) contests to achieve/highlight goals they have for Wikipedia? If so i'm not aware of them.

Wikipedia provides a lot of opportunities. I'm sure being inside the WMF does too. Would love to know more about it.

I don't know. That's a good question. It's sort of in everything we do as a subtext, but not as the theme of a blog or mailing list.

I will try to get answers for your questions.

One thing I can do though is criticize abuses in my profession and hope someone like you, someone who does have influence in the organization, actually gets off their ass and does something about it. Apparently that's not going to happen because you're waiting for me, a powerless outsider, to do your job. Awesome, well thanks for letting me know that's where donations go.

Instead, you're going to hide behind the age old defense of "Well if you don't like it do it yourself!" I'm sort of getting tired of doing that, and don't insult me like I don't attempt fixing things I think are broken. If I had more money I'd totally do more fixing, but best I can do is write a few books and some small bits of software.

Alas, I'm not wealthy and have no control. I could spend the next ten years fixing Wikipedia's broken PHP code and there would still be this stupid notability requirement. You know why?

Because, instead of fixing the technical problem of categorization and search, they created a social solution of notability and bizarre rules. Once they did that there's no putting the Djin back in the oil lamp.

What are you talking about?

It can be a bit crazy sometimes. You think you have problems with your page -- I heard that the #1 actor in India had his page deleted because some kid from a Western country thought he was non-notable. Wikipedia can be a great place to learn about science and technology, but let's say, the history of feminism? There are articles on every micro-neighborhood of San Francisco, but sometimes hardly anything on major cities of Africa.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215731

(also, lotsa wikimedia ppl on HN then? ;) )

My own personal feeling is that we are too quick to scrub stuff. But there is an important reason for the notability guideline; even though the Wiki is essentially limitless there is a point where indiscriminate inclusion just becomes impossible to handle. I reckon near 70% of the current content is sub-standard and probably about 20% is abysmal - the clean up effort on that is going to take decades. Without some form of line in the sand that gets worse and worse and worse till in the end we have a spam filled mess.

In this case the GNG was clearly being applied a little strongly; bottom line is that common sense is important :) A programming language with a tenuous but credible claim to notability should probably stay.

I wrote the Mongrel2 article, which is potentially hanging by the skin of its teeth if really questioned. Fortunately common sense does tend to prevail with most editors, so I don't see it being deleted any time soon.

> I personally have had some idiot with a vendetta get a page about me deleted numerous times

Which one? I cleaned up your [1] article a little while ago and all I found in the history was on old PROD (proposed deletion) [2]

The deletion process is designed to be flexible; so we have speedy deletions for stuff that is quite obviously out of scope or otherwise problematic from a single glance. Those are quite tight criteria and all they really need to be bypassed is a credible claim to significance (not notability, it is a lower claim). Next is the PROD; which requires you to make a statement about why it should be deleted. That sticks around for 7 days when an admin will have a look and either agree or disagree - during which time anyone else (this is what I spend a lot of my time doing) jumps in to fix it and decline the prod. Then we have AFD which is a full discussion lasting 7 days to establish whether the article can stay. The point is to make sure a few people are checking out the article.

It's not a perfect process for certain and sometimes it is possible for "a single person can get a page deleted", but never really without warning (to someone..).

There is, I think, two problems; firstly a groundswell of material we are slogging through the get up to scratch. And secondly we don't have enough active editors in the sub-domains. Feel free to fix the latter :)

All you need to do is make a place to put these pages rather than delete them and you'll solve tons of problems.

Deletionpedia does this already BTW. [3]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zed_Shaw

2. The PROD stemmed from when the article was first created. That is a real problem, it pisses me off how quick people are to tag & get rid of new stuff nowadays.

3. http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/

http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Special:R...

Even if this is true, you can do horrible deeds while thinking that you are acting in good faith, the Inquisition is a good but extreme example. What is needed to stop such nonsense is an internal balancing mechanism in Wikipedia against such wayward editors.

To be clear: I totally understand that things that are not being maintained need to not be supported; hell, that's the name of the game in engineering management as well as encyclopedia curation. It would obviously be detrimental to everyone if Wikipedia had a bunch of rotting content that it claimed was a reasonably accurate telling of reality.

Therefore, I concede that it is important that things that are not being maintained or that don't have enough source material aren't claimed to be part of the experience: this content needs to be found and flagged, and there probably should be a process for determining this, maybe even a "notability guideline".

However, actually /deleting/ the content is totally counter-productive: all you've done is made the project slightly less useful to someone out there. I mean, even if the content on that page was only half accurate (and 50% outright lies), that's about as good as much of the primary source material and historical record we have anyway (and many orders of magnitude better than medical research, according to recent meta-studies).

But, putting that particular argument aside for a moment, if a contributor comes by a week later and wants to know what happened and get involved in that particular discussion, maybe even is in a position to improve the article, it is too late: that data has been replaced by something that does no more than tell you when it was deleted, with a one-sentence explanation as to why (that is often something unintelligibly cryptic).

And that, to me, is the crux of the problem: Wikipedia is this amazing body of knowledge where you can see what people are changing and work together to solve problems in this wonderfully egalitarian community process... until someone deletes something, at which point the data is gone, and all record of what that topic was or why it may have been important to someone is now irretrievably lost.

So, if you are telling me that /that/ is something that is open to discussion, and that the only reason you haven't fixed /that/ is due to a resource constraint, whether it be developer time or server assets, then this is amazing, and more people should know this, because that is not at all the experience I've had talking with Wikipedia moderators.

And, on that note, I will happily give $10,000 to WikiMedia to hire an engineer to add this one feature. I imagine it will be reasonably simple, and should not take much time: deletion should become impossible, being replaced by a "this page has been deleted and is no longer considered to be maintained or accurate" banner (that itself is implemented in the exact same manner as the "up for deletion" banner).

Preferably, the list of deleted pages would then be aggregated to a page on the site (something I believe may already happen with these flags, but if not this should be easy to add) so that people who want to try to help improve the quality of this information can do so, which will also provide a good head start to anyone wanting to /start/ an article on a "newly notable" topic that used to be considered "deleted".

If $10,000 isn't enough, please figure out what it would take, and we can talk. That is (unfortunately) a lot of money to me (my company operates on almost no margin, so that's a sizable percentage of my operating budget), but I consider Wikimedia to be a really important project that, despite this horrendous flaw, benefits everyone, and I want to make certain that I'm doing my part to help.

Hell, if the problem ends up coming down to finding the engineer, I am willing to do the work myself, and can probably find a bunch of other people who would be willing to volunteer on this particular subproject: I bet we can even find developers who are "notable" (even by Wikimedia's current guidelines) to come out of the woodwork and pitch in.

But, until this particular issue is fixed, I really have no interest in becoming the guy from Zed's campaign, who gets to walk around with a t-shirt saying "I gave Wikipedia $100 and all they did was delete my favorite programming language.": I'd rather see Wikipedia collapse due to funding constraints and be replaced by whatever comes next than contribute to something that actively deletes and purges the precious information it has been entrusted with by society.

Please, I implore you: accept my humble donation offer, and let the destruction stop now.

If you want to see a deleted page you can usually ask an admin. They will generally restore it somewhere where you can see it unless it was deleted for some privacy reason.

It's unrealistic to expect the foundation to edit all the individual content, but they need to manage the processes. As they are, it's virtually impossible for anybody not already part of the circle-jerk of WP editors to provide any meaningful contributions. The jargon density alone in dealing with anything other than the most basic edits make most people quit immediately.

And no, starting up yet another discussion over WP:N is not going to solve the problem - that's a bigger losing battle than trying to keep a page for Alice ML alive. The foundation simply needs to step in and say "this is how it's going to be" and fix it.

Here's my 3 step solution for what it's worth:

1) AfD's are initially silent -- meaning nobody knows that an article has been flagged. An article needs at least a dozen AfD flags to spark a deletion process. The deletion process needs to be similarly fair, anonymous and automatic. That means secret ballot, long periods of consideration and discussion (not hours, more like months)...in other words, it needs to be a serious deal to remove an article from the site. AfD flags should disappear after 48 hours if no action or discussion has taken place and the default should be to keep the article.

2) Wikipedia needs to eliminate the class of editors completely from the site. Editing powers are given out to outright assholes who pretend to be operating in good faith but really just operate on a power trip. Users may only edit some fixed number of "things" per month. WP is dominated right now by people with literally nothing to do in their lives except spend 16 hours a day policing wikipedia. WP should not be encouraging this type of obsessive personality by giving them power over the community. I can say definitely, 100% of the problem that people have with WP is with these kinds of editors.

3) No single admin may pull the delete trigger, if the secret ballot shows a positive deletion assertion, it needs a panel of 3 admins to confirm. The process to reverse a deletion should be simple and similarly free from the personal whims of overzealous admins/editors.

WP:N needs to either be fixed, or go away. Despite being a guideline, editors treat it as a hard and fast rule that is paradoxically applied completely arbitrarily to individual pages. The guideline is so broken that it would probably only result in a wikipedia containing short snippets of common/popular knowledge if applied across the entire site -- basically what Zed calls "things my grandmother knows about". This completely defeats the purpose of a reference site. People come here to discover new information, not confirm what they already know. If anything, it should be harder to put a page up of highly notable things than long-tail things.

It's not that trying to contribute to wikipedia is inconvenient, or that it's jargon is unnecessarily dense, it's that it fucking sucks to try and be a positive force to expand wikipedia. It's painful, it's no fun, there's literally no reward, and hours and hours of work can poof! go away based on somebody's whim.

It used to be fun. I used to contribute things. There used to be useful and helpful discussions on every page, trying to make them as high quality as possible. But then people started to figure out that it's easier to just delete entire articles that contains a single typo, or where the writer hasn't pulled together all of the references yet or the subject hasn't risen to whatever arbitrary interpretation of WP:N that some random admin is using that day. Rather than try and improve the article, or help find the references, or help establish notability, poof gone goes the work.

And that's been going on for more than 5 years without any apparent movement by the foundation to fix this broken problem. It's not a technical issue (though I agree with Zed that much of it comes from the lack of a '/') it's a policy problem that the foundation needs to address.

edit I think I'll probably be checking out http://www.wikia.com/Wikia as a replacement for wikipedia. It looks like they have a much saner process on the surface.

I think these are interesting suggestions. You are right that the problem is actually relatively small and rests with a cadre of hyperzealous editors. However it is not clear to me that setting limits to editing behavior is really going to help -- those people will just resort to sockpuppets even more than normal. And limits to editing will also hurt a number of people who are doing a lot of good. Clay Shirky is more or less right that Wikipedia thrives on "cognitive surplus", so trying to limit the supply is just self-defeating.

What we need, IMO, is some different kind of structure where being a wiki-insider with OCD isn't the absolute advantage that it is today. I don't know what that would look like.

Jesus, does Zed Shaw live on another planet? I've never edited a Wikipedia article in my life and even I know that when an article is nominated for deletion, there's a big hullabaloo where everyone votes and argues about it before it's actually deleted.

Also:

It's sort of impossible to say that the Esoteric programming languages page should not have a description of every "notnotable" programming language.

I do not think "impossible" means what you think it means.

Also, I do mean "sort of impossible". If you're going to use bad grammar to correct my writing, then at least use quotes properly.

The "bizarre bureaucratic process" is this:

1) Somebody says "I don't think this article should be here.

2) We talk about it for a week.

3) If, after a week, the consensus is that no, we shouldn't have the article, then it gets deleted. If not, it stays.

That's not bizarre, and it's not particularly bureaucratic. Is it flawed? Absolutely. Do we need to fix it? Sure.

Are you helping things with your rants?

No.

1) Somebody says "I don't think this article should be here."

2) We talk about it for a week.

3) Despite there being no votes to delete and clear notability, poof! it's gone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review

Alternatively, if you wish to remake the page and improve it, there's nothing stopping you from re-creating it with new sources and information added[1]. The "Be Bold" guideline exists to encourage people to do things like that if you think you can improve it.

[1] Not entirely true, controversial pages that get recreated and deleted back and forth can be blocked from being recreated. At least in the case of Nemerle, it appears that that has yet to happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Undeletion (for articles which were deleted without contest)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review (for contested deletes)

In fi.wikipedia (I am an arbcom member there) both delete and undelete are decided by a 2/3 majority vote.

And it's still often actually deleted, even if consensus isn't reached.

Ohhh. Damn you, Bert Russell!

(I kill me.)

Jimbo put your dog on a leash, or next year, when your bambi eyed face gazes into me from my monitor, I will send a turd in a bag instead of a donation.

Does anyone know what address I could/should send my complaint to for maximum impact?

I’m not trying to defend the notability rules (I think that they are quite often pretty stupid), I’m only saying that it is completely and utterly wrong to claim that Wikipedia’s notability rules exist for a technical reason.

Wikipedia already stuffers from variable quality, and all its content comes with a big huge caveat emptor. Furthermore, the existence of poor quality doesn't have any bearing on whether the well trafficked content is good or not.

Deletionists really don't have any leg to stand on, and i find it mystifying and infuriating that they are allowed to continue deleting content put up by other people (mostly in good faith), essentially without cause or justification.

They can't delete their way to good content, because no content on wikipedia starts out as good content. You can't claim that leaving up poor content is a problem, or they should just lock the whole fucking thing, and only accept well curated patches.

To put it another way, even if someone writes a really, really good article about their neighbor's dog Spike - complete with genealogy down to Rover the fifth, the harrowing near-death encounter when that gallstone removal surgery went wrong, and even a detailed account of that incident last Wednesday when Spike wet the carpet, there are so few people who know anything about that dog that it's impossible to fact-check the article. For all anyone knows it's all made up. So the line has to be drawn somewhere, and there need to be clear policies for it, as otherwise, well, things like this happen.

These programming languages aren't non-existant, and can be verified as actually existing. It's not that there are no references to it.

On top of that, i'm still unclear why it would even matter? Things with little interest will generate little traffic. The potential to misinform is pretty low. And if it were to be the case that an article that was incorrect (maliciously or not) were to suddenly see an increase in traffic, presumably that can only serve to encourage people to point out inaccuracies and correct them (treating fictionalized accounts of anything as being an inaccuracy). And wikipedia already has a mechanism for resolving synonymy and name-resolution disputes.

Also, I think it would be easier to get editors if being an editor were more about making the site good and less about dealing with the head cases who currently edit the site. (Nothing personal intended against any individual editors who may be reading — it's just a general reflection of how things look to people who have casually attempted to try editing.)

It sounds like a missing UI. Something like the ability to show recent changes sorted by the pages' popularity. Too simple?

Another way to put this is, you can't expect a single flat namespace to contain even a reasonable amount of human knowledge. At some point, as any Librarian will tell you, you have to make a 2nd level. If they did then they'd solve the problem since you could say nothing is deleted and is just "subbed".

Of course, then that'd be a new insult, but at least information wouldn't disappear for no reason other than egocentric opinion.

You understand that you just said the organization that's devoted to becoming the largest record of human knowledge is interested in keeping that large record as small as possible.

Holy crap, I officially give up. The internet is nothing but a giant never ending scene from Catch-22.

If you want an article about every Pokémon and not just Pikachu you should start your own Pokémon wiki. That’s Wikipedia’s official party line. Well, at least the party line of the Deletionists (who seem to be winning).

This is a very controversial topic, the battle between Deletionists [1] and Inclusionists [2] has been raging for a long time on Wikipedia. Technical reasons really play no role in this battle.

[1] Wikimedia 2010-11 budget plan (PDF): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1...

[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism

[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism

This is exactly why I, like Zed, am sitting here wondering why precisely you think _I_ should donate so "deletionists" can have their own private party with their own stupidly applied overgeneralised rules? Maybe someone should start a wiki listing these other non-wikipedia-wikis, so I could go to some of them to donate instead.

Wikimedia will actually be spending those $16 million they just raised, those are not available to pay for anything besides what has already been budgeted. They would have to raise $32 million to pay for those ten minutes.

If you still believe that paying people to maintain Wikipedia is a viable strategy, consider the wider implications. Why would anyone volunteer to work for Wikipedia if Wikimedia is willing to pay at least some people for the exact same work?

I’m willing to bet that on average an article gets more attention per year than ten minutes. Wikipedia couldn’t survive if all that volunteer work would disappear.

...and funnily enough the root of the problem, if Wikipedia could have a rating scale instead of the binary "accepted/deleted" then everyone could be happy. In such a system you could browse only reviewed, fact-checked, vetted, editted, adminned, wp:blergh articles, and have something that looks a lot like a real encyclopedia. Or you could browse at the EVERTHING setting, and read more about obscure pokemon references than you could ever want, or you could browse at any setting inbetween and get the level you want.

It's a false dichotomy that the choice is between either a well-edited encyclopedia or un-edited fandom crap. You can have both at the same time.

Plan B does not work. Wikipedia guidelines do not consider self-published sources as 'reliable' and things published by Lulu are considered self-published. Wikipedia does not consider itself a reliable source either. It is also not going to disappear in a puff of logic like God in hhgttg, no matter how witty you think it is.

Plan C has not worked in the years of people deleting things that appeal to far broader audiences than esoteric programming languages. They are still around. How well do you think this will work?

Plan D is something many people have done. In a way, Wikia is a giant example of it. In other cases they go to wikinfo or create their own wiki.

This post is exactly like 100s of others that someone writes whenever Wikipedia deletes (or even tries to delete) something that they care about. The ground is well-tread and it brings nothing new or interesting to the table. The internet does not need another blog post where someone spends an hour in isolation writing about it.

On an irrelevant note, mediawiki does support subpages (the slashes), but articles cannot have them as article titles may contain slashes. This has absolutely nothing to do with Wikipedia's notation of notability and the reasons people try to get rid of non-notable content.

Plan B wouldn't be "self-published". It would be published by me as a record of the languages that came out that year. Since no language I have is in the book, it's not self-published. If what you're really saying is Wikipedia doesn't recognize Lulu.com, then they're gigantic hypocrites. My book, "Learn Python The Hard Way" is published there, and has an ISBN and Lulu is my publisher. It's just as legit as my books published by Addison/Wesley, especially given their size.

You say Plan C doesn't work, but then here you are debating the topic, and Wikipedia's primary supporters are probably all over this. As many other people say, it's all filled with white nerdy males. If Wikipedia goes around deleting the things they like in order to "de-nerdify" the content, then eventually people will stop donating and go after them. I plan on doing it, and maybe some others.

Plan D is mostly a joke, but it might be good to create a record of the "great nerd purge" that seems to be hitting Wikipedia lately.

I also find it sad that you say people write things like this when Wikipedia deletes content they care about, and yet nothing is done. In fact, you sound powerful and proud of this fact, like it gives you a sense of pride, which is really really scary.

Wikipedia's policies would consider it self-published. It does not matter that you would be writing about languages that you are not affiliated with. Again, you are not going to change Wikipedia's policies by pointing out that Wikipedia itself is self-published in their eyes.

I think you are vastly overestimating the number of people that have even heard, much less care about these esoteric languages.

I do not know why you ascribe these emotions to me, but they are not in the least accurate. I do not think my personal opinion on this set of articles is at all significant. I do not care about them, either way.

Frankly, what disturbs me is how you have very strong opinions about how Wikipedia does or should work with an incredibly superficial actual understanding. For example, why do you argue over how Wikipedia sees Lulu? Have you even read Wikipedia's policy on Reliable Sources or Verifiability? It is not as if Lulu itself or other things like it are new. It has been debated a number of times and at length. You have no knowledge of the issue and provide no insight.

* Disruption to make a point, which would be used to shoot down Plan A - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:POINT

* Strict invocation of the rules - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LAWYER

* 'Gaming the system' in general. See how they forbid pointing out contradictions in the application of the rules! - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gaming_the_system

I can see how the spirit of them was to lubricate discussion and decision making, but when you have such a complex etiquette which can be used to silence newcomers upon breach, you have just a recipe for abuse.

Just because you know so goddamn much about policies and the like, doesn't mean anybody else cares.

Since you mostly seem to be interested in seeing yourself further existing bureaucracy and not IAR to create the best a resource for wikipeida users, I will engage you in a futile attempt to point out the reason that people are not doing what you ask.

However, that still doesn't make deletionism a good or sensible or internally consistent idea.

Either wikipedians can try to change the expectations of the entirety of the rest of the internet, or they should deal with their internal problem.

As far as i have ever been able to determine, the only people who support deletionism are a subset of wikipedians.

Instead, wikipedia should allow most any article to be added, but have one or more groups that "certify" articles as notable. People who want to avoid all the non-notable clutter can then elect a view of wikipedia that only includes articles certified by the group (or groups) they choose, while non-notable articles can still be viewed by those who choose to view them, and can have the breathing room to in some cases evolve into notable articles.

In the beginnings it actually made sense, too, since it would never have took off if every page was about Joe Schmo's cat.

But now that Wikipedia is probably more famous and more well known than any other "real world" encyclopedia, such "respectability hacks" are unneeded and should be repelled.

There've been a few abortive attempts to create a repository for deleted Wikipedia content, or a more inclusionist Wikipedia with the same software... and they've all proved moribund.

The trick is not just the name or concept, but the entire community and mission. Reusing the same software – while attractive for a quick start – could present problems. Part of the reason Wikipedia has resorted to deletionism, in my mind, has been weaknesses in MediaWiki, and having the same general appearance and workflow is likely to just walk a new project down the same paths. And defining an alternative solely as "what Wikipedia isn't" puts a rather hard and low cap on its growth as an independent identity.

With these problems in mind, I've started working on a reference knowledge-base to complement Wikipedia that will loosen the 'notability' requirement in favor of 'true and useful'. Otherwise, it will share the same licensing and a wiki-centric edit model.

The project codename is 'Infinithree' ('∞³'), and I'm discussing it pre-launch at http://infinithree.org and (Twitter/Identica) @infinithree.

wikipedia was a huge threat to traditional information sources, but now something has to come from one of those traditional sources to be considered legitimate info. problem solved.

Immediate problem would of course be advertising, which would not be desired.

It's just that if I donate now, I feel as if I am supportive of their deletionist policies, which I am not.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softpedia

Chris nominated 8 pages for deletion over a period of 3 days. While it's a spree that's likely hasty, it's by no means a rampage. I believe he was wrong to do as he did, but only a couple pages were deleted, and there's a discussion to have Nemerle restored. He's hardly a one-man wiki-wrecking crew.

The de facto process is to default to delete. As this embarrassing debacle has shown, there were no votes to delete, and yet poof! the articles were deleted and a day later, with significant backlash and discussion, almost all in favor to reinstate or at least open the pages back up to be reconstituted, are not back up.

Wikipedia's editing "process" is a shameful joke.

If you're trying to tell me the page would have been deleted even if Chris hadn't proposed it, I suppose I can't disprove that version of history, but I can say that it's pretty bizarre.

(Edited because joke was unclear.)

> Dear internet,

> You guys win. I will stop nominating pages for deletion.

> I wasn't doing this to troll or to slam any language community. I was just trying to help -- I read the WP guidelines for inclusion, and whenever I came across a language that didn't seem to meet said criteria, I nominated it for AfD. I think, with respect to Wikipedia's established notability guidelines, my arguments for deletion were airtight, which is probably why the articles were eventually deleted. I'm not sure my actions warranted the kind of internet-hatred I received as a result. If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue. Few took this route, and I am sorry that due to time constraints and an overwhelming amount of invective I could not reply sensibly to everyone.

> Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop. I personally think a lot of the articles should have been deleted. I think that ALL articles I nominated for deletion fail to meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages? Otherwise, some other naive editor will eventually try to delete them. Perhaps they won't have as much experience dealing with trolls and flamebait as I have had, and will become very hurt and confused. Nobody wants that :(

But that's not really the point here. It's just because it's wikipedia that everyone gets all weird about it. The information is out there, I don't see why it's so important that every esoteric project have a wikipedia.org page. It's not supposed to be a compendium of ALL human knowledge, it's an encyclopedia of generally useful knowledge. There has to be SOME criteria for excluding stuff. There's already a problem with wikipedia containing way too many pages about nerd topics and not enough information about the rest of the world.

...:

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. —Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds. Slashdot, 2004. http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/07/28/1351230/Wikipe...

“It’s about diversifying the community. At the moment we’re really male, geek orientated, which is great, but there are lots of editors that we don’t get who are geeks, but not tech geeks. So they may be real experts in, say, ancient Chinese poetry but if they go to try to edit Wikipedia, then they find it too intimidating and we lose them and that’s just silly."

I think this whole explosion of whatever-it-is-itis is a perfect example of that.

As it turns out, no.

And it turns out minority means "outside the male, machismo-dominated world of the alpha techno-geek."

It also turns out that even esoteric technogeekery is outside the tiny circle.

And it only takes one alphageek to make it so.

This is an organizational problem with Wikipedia, not just an isolated incident.

I'm just saying, wikipedia most likely can't and probably shouldn't contain an article about everything. It's just not possible, nor desirable, although it makes a good quote. It seems like deleting useless crap is one approach to that, and encouraging editors to contribute more to non-nerd-lore topics is another approach.

In what way?

encouraging editors to contribute more to non-nerd-lore topics

Surprise! Deleting Star Wars articles doesn't create more content for the article about the large-tailed antshrike.

And guess what? I don't even like Star Wars, and I think the lack of information on, you know, real stuff (in contrast to "nerd-lore topics") is disheartening. So lay off with the kind of presumptions you're throwing around in these comments.

I agree it was more of a tangential quote and not a direct counter, but I was trying to point out that some of this "deletionism" is probably due to a recognition that not everything is being covered equally, and it might be nice to prune the leaves from time to time to encourage growth in new directions. Or something like that. Also, I'm not trying to speak for anyone else but myself, everything I said was just my own musing about the topic. However, I do have a feeling that if the first 10 years of wikipedia was represented by your quote, the next 10 years might be represented by mine. The goal seems to be growing up and encouraging people, which seems like a good idea, considering all the rage generated by this topic. If it can't contain everything then what it does NOT contain is going to be a deliberate choice by the community, and this whole thread seems to be dominated by one side of the argument so I thought I'd throw in a tangent. Thanks for the thoughtful comments though, and I should probably have put more thought into my own comments, I was just commenting in the spur of the moment.

Could you explain the mechanism by which that would work?

Do you expect that the person contributing articles about Star Wars will, after his article on Boba Fett's brother in law is deleted, decided to write an article about critical feminist post-industrialist theory?

Sure, maybe in 10 years after they grow up and develop some interests besides Star Wars, that person might have something more useful to contribute.

You're suggesting that this kind of deletionism is constructive in the long run. The onus is on you here.

My quote was all-encompassing. The attitude in it eclipses the attitude in your quote.

Let me present the spoils of battle to the victor... I will immediately start writing a program that will recursively search wikipedia, perform a google search and then feed those results BACK into wikipedia automatically. Then it will surely be all-encompassing, no? Even better, version 2.0 will automatically categorize that knowledge and as a side effect I will have created Artificial Intelligence. No thanks necessary!

And I hereby swear to never again think that an encyclopedia written and maintained by humans should have a breadth of topics organized at a scale that makes sense to other humans, that's deletionist wrongthought!

(I do apologize for the sarcasm, but seriously not really)

Striving for "the sum of all human knowledge" necessarily implies a compendium that includes "ancient Chinese poetry" written by a diversified community with editors who are "not tech geeks".

My point is that you tried to retort with a completely sideways quote as if it was at odds with the one I used, when it's not. If you've achieved the sum of all human knowledge or are working towards it, you've already picked up or are continuing to pick up along the way the types highlighted in the quote you used. It's not taking a new direction, because you were already traveling in all directions.

Dipshit. (That's a petty attack.)

Heres a tip: I'm not an editor anymore and it didn't have anything to do with intimidation from the size of wikipeida, it had to do with intimidation with the huge stack of wikipieda policies I was going to have to master to try and navigate around the busybodies running the place just to fix up some articles.

In all honesty, do you think allowing something with Nemerle's level of notability would be bad for Wikipedia? Is it somehow crowding out articles about these "other parts of the world" you mention that would otherwise exist?

I do not belong to any of the language communities involved, and neither do I depend on those languages for my day to day work. But languages interest me, though I am not a PL person. That is why Wikipedia is an important resource for me to come in contact with these languages. Yes, the content might exist on other parts of the web, but here it has already been collected under one umbrella. The quality on average is good, the site is speedy and without distracting cruft.

So of course that is one of the first resource I will turn to, and I have often been plentifully rewarded. Google is not the internet, neither is Wikipedia. Nevertheless if I want to search for something I will go to Google and if I want to browse something I will go to Wikipedia.

So, what these deletions mean to me is someone is destroying the value that Wikipedia has for me. I am sure many people feel the same way and hence the outrage.

Personally, I really think Wikipedia has developed a culture of fetishism around the guidelines that violates their spirit (e.g. ignore all rules) where the wikilawyers chase away the real contributors — and I don't like the "take it to Wikia" suggestion because it just creates a financial incentive for Wikimedia to ignore the problem.

And, if you have 2nd class citizens riding in the back of the wikipedia bus via wikia, i fail to see how interlinking them into the main Wikipedia makes things worse in any way shape or form.

If anything, the opposite happens. Contributors first come for special interests. Once welcomed into the community, they will stick around and their contributions broaden in scope. Was the interest that sparked their involvement Elizabethan drama or Star Wars? Who cares.

1. Articles are not substitutable goods.

2. The supply of articles is not a zero sum game.

The English Wikipedia is amazing, but it's incredibly ethnocentric in its coverage. There're a lot of red links here, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_articles_by_.... Unfortunately, when you are looking for information that's not something the average native English-speaking editor has knowledge of, and you are able to find some information, sometimes those writing it have a vested interest in the topic at hand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_supremacy is a minor example.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/8292978/Wiki...

Somethingawful even made a game out of it, the results of which were quoted in that article:

For example, the article on "Women's suffrage" is around the same length as the "List of fictional gynoids and female cyborgs", and Shakespeare's Henry VIII is given as much attention as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

What do the near-constant donation drives cover then?

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/49/Wikime...

"Plan A" is not a new idea, it's exactly what happens to other categories with lots of items that don't deserve their own page.

"Plan B" won't work because part of deletionist policy is to ignore sources published by self-publishing outfits, because "anybody can publish there".

"Plan C" won't solve a goddamn thing. Good luck with "Plan D".

Quit asking for features that already exist.

Thanks for playing anonymous troll.

Uh... nope.

Hey, I have an idea! Let's publish suggestions like this to a blog and purport for it to be sound, so then it can be picked up by quacks who have an agenda to push in a bunch of completely unrelated situations. (Think vaccine scare pushers or those looking for self-promotion, who already exist in abundance on Wikipedia). Yeah! Let's all eschew with stuff like a "nuanced understanding".

Whether you are for or against this instance of deletionism, Shaw's plan B here wouldn't successfully legitimize anything of any subject matter, and that's a good thing.

Another thing to note: People say that Lulu doesn't have an editorial process but they do. Once you publish a book they review it and if it meets their standards they put it into Amazon and other sellers for you. Considering that editorial standards at all publishing houses is damn near zero except for copy-editing and slapping a cover on, I think it's fair to say Lulu is just fine as a source.

Sorry, what? If someone told you Wikipedia succeeded in a "fight for legitimacy", you were lied to.

they're just tools of the giant corporate publishers

You don't have to be published by giant corporate publishers to be cited on Wikipedia. You don't have be published by corporate publishers, giant or not. There are an immense number of citations on Wikipedia that fail to meet those criteria, and they can even be the best sources to cite (and not just because of a lack of sources).

Instead, they would need to recognize Lulu (like Amazon and the Library of Congress do) and accept books from there or be shown as complete hypocrites.

No, no; no need to argue here. You already had me sold. Down with nuanced understanding, I say.

A "nuanced understanding" of rules just lets people enforce them arbitrarily. Either make them concrete and fair, or find a way to not need them.

http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Special:R...