The notability requirements do not exist for a technical reason. That’s entirely wrong. Maintainability is the reason. The space is not limited but the time of people working on those articles. The goal is for Wikipedia to only have articles of a high quality, the more articles there are the harder that gets.
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.
But the argument from maintainability is stupid too.
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.
The point isn't to delete bad content. The point is to delete content that is known by so few people that it is unlikely to get the attention needed to become a good article.
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.
If Wikipedia just accumulated everything it could, we'd end up with a billion articles 90% of which are vandalized, outdated, mistaken crap. The potential to misinform would be huge. They can only successfully scale the corpus at the rate at which they gain volunteer editors (who are far rarer than people who just write one article about their favorite obscure thing, and then leave).
It is frankly easier to get a fake article by the editors than a real one. The editors generally do not check articles for accuracy or quality (beyond what a high-schooler with a dictionary could do) — they just fastidiously apply a checklist of rules.
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.)
This still sounds like a technical limitation. A page that gets ten hits a year should not demand as much editorial oversight as one that gets a million. Who cares if a long tail article gets vandalized if no one sees it?
It sounds like a missing UI. Something like the ability to show recent changes sorted by the pages' popularity. Too simple?
If something is vandalized or mistaken then delete it, if it is outdated then there should be some kind of long term archiving policy but I fail to understand the reasoning behind deleting articles which are factually correct, even if rather obscure. What harm do they do?
Either all articles are high quality and there's no room for esoteric knowledge, or the entire system will collapse under the weight of misinformation? That's an obvious false dichotomy.
You could also just take the article in good faith at face value. I don't think anyone really believes everything on wikipedia is going to be top notch quality. If people are looking up popular things a lot of work will have been done maintaining the article, if they are looking up things of narrow interest it is reasonable to assume that everything there might be from just a single perspective, but could still give value to that person.
Well, then if there is no technical reason, then it's a usability flaw or just stupidity. If it is possible to create meta-pages that could house sub-cultures and esoteric information, then they aren't doing it and using these rules for no reason. If they can't create one more level, then it's a technical problem they should solve.
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.
As I said, the official reason for the notability rules is maintainability – to keep the amount of articles low and relevant so that they can be maintained.
What?! To keep the amount of articles low? Ok wait, why were they begging for 10 million dollars then? So they can have no content?
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.
They don’t want to keep the amount of articles as small as possible, they want just the right type and amount of articles so that they can maintain them. Wikipedia depends on volunteers and I don’t think Wikimedia can afford to pay people to maintain articles [1].
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.
"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 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.
I don’t think you should do anything and hell is going to freeze over before I defend deletionists beyond pointing out the argument they are actually making.
Any time I find two groups of people arguing and waring over a boolean definition of themselves I can usually find a third option. I also know that they'll never adopt the third option because fighting and winning stupid wars like this makes people feel powerful.
They really don't. $16M to curate 3.5 million articles? That's 38 minutes of work per article from minimum-wage temps. That would cover one pass over the English edition alone, with nothing left to pay for hosting nor all the other languages. No, they would have to raise hundreds of millions or more to stop relying on scarce volunteer editors.
If you include the next nine Wikipedias with the most articles there are already eleven million articles to maintain. $16 million would pay for ten minutes per article per year (assuming $8 per hour which might not even be possible).
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.
Why would you spend an equal amount of time on each article, that's insane?!?
...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.
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.