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.