Delete-me-not
September 18, 2008 5:54 AM   Subscribe

Deletionpedia : an automatically updated collection of deleted pages from Wikipedia.

The name was suggested by Nicholson Baker. For meta-referential enjoyment, the Wikipedia page about Deletionpedia is of course currently "being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy".
posted by roofus (50 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
For those of you that don't know about it already, MetaFilter has an equivalent to this.
posted by burnmp3s at 6:05 AM on September 18, 2008 [11 favorites]


The concise list of films with monkeys in them showed a potential not recognized by Wikipedia.

No imagination these guys. No imagination at all.
posted by three blind mice at 6:08 AM on September 18, 2008


The concise list of films with monkeys in them showed a potential not recognized by Wikipedia.

Hopefully, in the near-ish future, you'll be able to get an answer to something like that via SPARQL.

Personally, I think this seems like a decent enough compromise between both sides.
posted by mandal at 6:16 AM on September 18, 2008


This is good (though it seems semi-broken now), a bit of an end-run around some of the pernicious Wikipedia policies. The Deletionpedia entry has a quote that sums it up:

"a lot of good work - verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange - is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow notion of what sort of curiosity an online encyclopedia should be able to satisfy."

Somewhat related and amusing in a sad way, here is the current Wikipedia entry on Mudkip.

Mudkip (ミズゴロウ, Mizugorou?), known as the "Mud Fish" species of Pokémon, are featured as one of the selectable starter Pokémon in the third generation of the series. They are small blue Pokémon with a large fin on their head that allows them to sense movements within the air and water, acting as a radar. While in the water, they use the yellow, spiky gills on their cheeks to breathe while using their large tail fin to propel themselves. They are extremely strong, despite their small bodies; they are able to lift large boulders by planting all four feet and heaving, and easily crush them. When it comes time to sleep, they bury themselves within the soil at the edge of the water. In the anime, Brock obtains a Mudkip at Dewford Island, which later evolves into a Marshtomp.

The phrase "So I herd u liek mudkipz" has become an Internet meme following its initial appearance on the imageboard 4chan. The meme has resulted in a large number of tribute videos on YouTube.


That second paragraph is in its way the most useful part - I imagine it's much more likely some random person needs to figure out what a mudkip is after having heard about it from the meme rather than need to know about it as a Pokemon. It's way more fucking useful than reading that Brock obtained a Mudkip at Dewford. But here is the huge five-archives Wikidrama battle Anon had to fight to get that information up there. A big absurd argument used against it was that the meme wasn't properly proven to exist.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 6:17 AM on September 18, 2008 [4 favorites]


Internal server error. Every time I try to go somewhere on that site. Refresh works. Meh.
posted by C17H19NO3 at 6:17 AM on September 18, 2008


This is Good. I often count on Wikipedia to offer a concise summary of obscure subjects which would otherwise have information about themselves scattered across scores of two-bit blogs and old forum threads. But there are so many times when an article like this, even when it's well-written and accurate, gets deleted from the record.

For instance, I came across a webcomic awhile back that struck my fancy, so I went to Wikipedia to read more about its background, cast of characters, etc. But lo and behold, the article had been disappeared. A little investigating into the deletion log showed that the article as written had failed to find enough sources to back up its claims about the series.

That's the deletion reason that irks me the most, and seems to occur the most often: not citing enough sources. Who cares if the book or film or website has a fairly well-established identity and has numerous references to it across the web. If it's not mentioned in some prominent news source or scholarly paper, any sufficiently-motivated Wikipedian can have the subject dumped just like that. And editors inclined to do just that tend to be an inflexible lot, so any attempt to revive the article with new and relevant sources is met with much resistance.
posted by Rhaomi at 6:24 AM on September 18, 2008 [4 favorites]


Somehow it would be awesome if this FFP was deleted.
posted by chillmost at 6:30 AM on September 18, 2008


That monkeys list was terrible disappointing - three movies about apes, really?
posted by naoko at 6:31 AM on September 18, 2008


The vast majority of it is cruft that deserves to be deleted and never seen. The trick is finding the gems.
posted by stbalbach at 6:35 AM on September 18, 2008


That's the deletion reason that irks me the most, and seems to occur the most often: not citing enough sources. Who cares if the book or film or website has a fairly well-established identity and has numerous references to it across the web.

Because there needs to be a cutoff somewhere, otherwise WP just becomes a mirror of the net, and what would be the point of that? More to the point, few or no citations means that any dickhead can come along and put whatever they like in without any recourse. While it's true that WP is broken in some astounding ways, it's also very strong in some others. Requiring references is one of those strengths.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 6:37 AM on September 18, 2008


Somehow it would be awesome if this FFP was deleted.

And by awesome, I mean deliciously recursive.
posted by chillmost at 6:41 AM on September 18, 2008 [1 favorite]


Can we have a deleted-triviapedia too? I dont know why geeks feel the need to match up any random subject with either anime or star trek.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:02 AM on September 18, 2008


It's getting slashdotted, which will explain the outages.
posted by Happy Dave at 7:02 AM on September 18, 2008


Deletionpedia has a problem

Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.

Try waiting a few minutes and reloading.

(Can't contact the database server: User wikiuser already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections (mysql.dbatley.com))


Uh-oh. Someone just deleted the article about dividing by zero.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 7:20 AM on September 18, 2008


No, no, it was a list of all Doctor Who fan fiction circa 1980 which discusses the concept of zero.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:25 AM on September 18, 2008


Deletionpedia has a problem

This is why we can't have nice things.
posted by mwhybark at 7:46 AM on September 18, 2008


I totally just hacked into the CIA wikipedia page and edited a typo.
posted by clearly at 7:47 AM on September 18, 2008


Also... wouldn't Deletapedia have been a better name? Rolls off the tongue rather more trippingly.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 8:11 AM on September 18, 2008


How I Spread A Lie About Ghostface Killah, or Why You Should Not Trust Goddamn Wikipedia

Not entirely on-topic, but an interesting story about vandalizing Wikipedia
posted by Damn That Television at 9:00 AM on September 18, 2008


Pff. These days actually deleting things is passé amongst deletionists*, since it generally requires deleting things. Over aggressive pruning, or blanking and redirecting is the order of the day.

BTW The simplest and easiest way to defeat a deletionist who is using a regular deletion process is to drop a bunch of cites on things. If you can get two of them from good sources it defeats most attacks. If the page already has external links consider making them into cites – for some reason they count as cites but not as links.

* Except for things that actually require deleting, which is a very small percentage of their targets and usually taken care of by someone who isn’t a zealot.
posted by Artw at 9:03 AM on September 18, 2008


Because there needs to be a cutoff somewhere, otherwise WP just becomes a mirror of the net, and what would be the point of that?

Provided it had a good index, a mirror of the net sounds pretty useful to me.

And, calm down la, calm down. Why delete a list of the characters from Brookside, ey? Barry Grant and Terry are cultural icons, la. Those mods need to calm down and let the encyclopedia genuinely reflect popular culture.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 9:10 AM on September 18, 2008


Not entirely on-topic, but an interesting story about vandalizing Wikipedia

So is there any more to that link than this:

"How I Spread A Lie About Ghostface Killah, or Why You Should Not Trust Goddamn Wikipedia." (NB: A quick Idolator search for "chunky Mario" only turned up an old piece on Perez Hilton. Whew!) [Robotskull]

Because if there is, I'm not seeing it. In three different browsers, I'm not seeing it.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 9:21 AM on September 18, 2008


???
posted by klangklangston at 9:25 AM on September 18, 2008


The True History of Count Chocula
posted by milkrate at 9:34 AM on September 18, 2008 [1 favorite]


Because if there is, I'm not seeing it. In three different browsers, I'm not seeing it.

Huh. The link attached to it doesn't work any longer. It was a story about how someone added a wildly implausible fake nickname under Ghostface Killah's wikipedia entry and then an interviewer called him by that nickname in a video. Not exactly groundbreaking, but it made a pretty convincing/humorous argument for why Wikipedia should never be used, ever, for anything serious.

OH WELL, I GUESS IT HAS BEEN LOST TO THE SANDS OF TIME
posted by Damn That Television at 9:46 AM on September 18, 2008


Follow the money.

A strict deletion-ist policy keeps Wikipedia smaller, but more importantly gives the opportunity to "compromise" by allowing the deleted article to be resurrected on Jimmy Wales's for-profit wikia.com.

Jimmy always wanted to profit off wikipedia, but couldn't because the free software movement threatened to produce an alternative, free encyclopedia without advertising. By using increasingly arcane rules to declare articles "unencyclopediac", Jimmy ensures there will always be a ready supply of content to build up Wikia, and host advertising.

And (this is Jimmy's genius) not only is all the content free to him, but the wikipedia "bureaucrats" who mark an article "unencyclopediac" also work for free, for the shear enjoyment of being allowed to play-act as judges.

Of course, it decreases the value of wikipedia, if in order to find out why people are posting about "mudkipz" I have to check wikipedia and then any number of wikia wikis. But the more wikia wikis I look at, the more ads I see: just like "Experts Exchange", Wales (a self described "libertarian") haslearned that the money's not in cleanly supplying information, but in playing bait-and-switch to sell the maximum ads the users will put up with.

Like Gracenote, users supply all the data for free, then have to put up with restrictions supposedly for the good of the collective product (in Gracenote's case, restrictive EULAs, in Wikipedia's case, rampant bureaucratization and deletion), then the collective work is sold or otherwise monetized to produce a private profit.
posted by orthogonality at 9:51 AM on September 18, 2008 [3 favorites]


by allowing the deleted article to be resurrected on Jimmy Wales's for-profit wikia.com.

Wait, is someone expecting me to pay for this deleted crap? Sorry, Im not buying it nor would I ever buy it.

This situation has absolutely nothing to do with gracenote or experts exchange (which is free if you scroll down). This is an editorial process, IMHO, which makes the wikipedia much easier to use. No more searching results a mile long because the otaku thinks 1,000 articles about fabrics used in Star Trek costumes and backdrops are noteworthy.

Just like people say here: GYOB. Start your own Star Trek or whatever Wiki.
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:08 AM on September 18, 2008


Now my life has purpose.
posted by Lacking Subtlety at 10:15 AM on September 18, 2008 [1 favorite]


Or just fork the wikipedia. This has been done several times and theyre all failures. I occasionally see them in google search results. What the otaku cant stand is that wikipedia users actually like the sometimes heavy-handed editors and see through the manufactured controversy those who have been deleted keep promoting.

I guess everyone loves a good conspiracy theory.
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:15 AM on September 18, 2008


If it's not mentioned in some prominent news source or scholarly paper, any sufficiently-motivated Wikipedian can have the subject dumped just like that.

WP:V (verifiability) is a core policy for Wikipedia and always has been. It's more a matter of writing an article without sources being like speeding and hoping you don't get caught. Now, in general, an article that is sourceable will survive deletion -- that is, if during the discussion someone (it has often enough been me) can show that it appears substantially in Google News Archive or Google Books, or elsewhere if need be -- then it has a good shot. Heck, even a popular article with iffy sources that gets rewritten really well might be able to make it. But in general there is consensus that Wikipedia is not about interesting stuff that somebody decided to put in it (like Everything2), but about stuff that has been proven by outside sources. This existed well before Wikia was formed, by the way. It's just that enforcement has tightened gradually over the years.

My major complaint with deletionists is those who pick topics to AFD that are pretty obviously notable in a select domain -- museum presidents, for instance -- but it just isn't one they're familiar with. This has been a declining problem in my experience.
posted by dhartung at 11:52 AM on September 18, 2008


I've told this story before. One time I was looking for some information about Business Scorecard Manager, a Microsoft server product used in enterprise networks all over the world. Wikipedia articles for comparable server apps are very useful and include good links to other resources on the web.

What I found was this. Read that thread. This is the editorial wisdom of the Wikipedia deletionists. "i'm sure bill can pay for his own advertisments," one neutral editor observes. Another astutely remarks that Wikipedia shouldn't talk about Microsoft products because they're not open source. What the fuck?

I wish they knew that they're killing Wikipedia. The entire outside world knows it, but on they go with their little consensus party.

Oh, and click through my profile if you want to see my Wikipedia contributions. I used to contribute to Wikipedia a lot, often citing actual, real-life books. I just had my edits reverted by people who didn't know anything about the topics one too many times.
posted by roll truck roll at 11:53 AM on September 18, 2008 [2 favorites]


I wish they knew that they're killing Wikipedia.

They shouldn't know that, because it simply isn't true. Wikipedia is much healthier now than it has been in the past. Wikipedia in 2005 and before was a freaking joke, as I well remember when reading through it then. Poorly-written articles of dubious accuracy were common. Heading into 2006, things became better, although Wikipedia hoaxes and sorta-kinda English articles remained great chuckle fodder for the pundits. Improvements continued and now, in 2008, it is common to randomly select an article and find it in great shape: informative, well-cited, and well-written. MetaFilter itself supports this idea; along with the copious quantities of the Wikipedia links made from MetaFilter, you will frequently see editorial comments of the nature "surprisingly useful".

Can you still find crap articles and hoaxes? Of course, but those articles are far more rare than they used to be as a percentage of the 2.5M (English version) total articles. Many people think that Wikipedia is still riddled with "poop", "mr smith molests his students", and "I luv big boobs" remarks, but speaking as one who actively seeks out old vandalism, it is one helluva lot harder to find overt vandalism than it used to be. Certainly not impossible by any means, but several hundred instances do not immediately leap out from a vandal search. Nor even a dozen.

But back to the deletionist point: for every radical deletionist I've seen on Wikipedia, I've seen a radical inclusionist. There are regular editors--and yes I can think of a couple off the top of my head--who, last time I peeked in, invariably recommend keeping an article at the Articles for Deletion page.

It's unfortunate that good content goes away in deletions (though never permanently if you can garner support for an article's return at Deletion Review), but this is a price paid in the never-ending struggle between deletionist and inclusionist philosophies, of what is notable and what is not. It is emphatically true that the blurry lines on notability cause far too much collateral damage. Open source drama hurts a project, what else is new?

One thing to keep in mind is that there is a constant flow of unhappy people away from Wikipedia because they cannot or will not fully divorce their ego from their contributions. It is basic human nature to be that way, and it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Many of the best articles on Wikipedia have been written by people who are perhaps too attached to their articles (like probably a half of all featured article writers). The downside of the attachment is dedicated editors can get really angry and stomp off in a huff when they see deletions or changes by others of which they don't approve, for reasons good and bad. There are lots of pissed-off people out there, to the point it is trivial to find read high-profile posts about how Wikipedia is dying, or on a goofball conspiracy theory.

Wikipedia continues to have serious faults, a number of which will never go away because of the open contribution nature of the model, but dying it ain't.
posted by mdevore at 12:59 PM on September 18, 2008 [1 favorite]


"i'm sure bill can pay for his own advertisments," one neutral editor observes. Another astutely remarks that Wikipedia shouldn't talk about Microsoft products because they're not open source. What the fuck?

Those arent deletists. Those are the OSS zealot pricks. Hell, you can barely post a windows support question here at ask.mefi without the same 3 or 4 assholes writing "BUY A MAC" "INSTALL LINUX!!" Its just worse at wikipedia.
posted by damn dirty ape at 1:26 PM on September 18, 2008


A strict deletion-ist policy keeps Wikipedia smaller, but more importantly gives the opportunity to "compromise" by allowing the deleted article to be resurrected on Jimmy Wales's for-profit wikia.com.

The problem with this theory is that the crazy basement-dwelling fanboy stuff that gets Wikia wikis isn't what gets deleted from Wikipedia. The articles on every Pokemon ever and on every Star Trek episode ever don't get AfD'ed. Articles like the one on KOMPRESSOR do - 2 full AfD votes so far and I even sullied myself with the wikidrama slightly when I went this one time to read about KOMPRESSOR and saw that it was up for a speedy deletion I could at least stop just by speaking up.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 1:36 PM on September 18, 2008


If it wasn't for deleted wikipedia pages we'd never have gotten Uncyclopedia, a much more valuable resource than some webcomic or something.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:40 PM on September 18, 2008


Metafilter: Deliciously Recursive.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 3:43 PM on September 18, 2008


A lot of pages which are deleted from Wikipedia are just not very interesting. We need something like Wikidumper, which attempts to show only interesting deleted pages. But it should be updated automatically somehow. Spawning DeletionWikidumperpedia, a site which collects the pages that weren't interesting enough to be included in Wikidumper.
posted by twoleftfeet at 3:45 PM on September 18, 2008


I wonder how far back this goes. Off the top of my head, I know of two deleted (a year ago?) articles that aren't listed there.

I wonder if contributing old Wikipedia dumps would help.
posted by Pronoiac at 4:36 PM on September 18, 2008


dirtynumbangelboy: Because there needs to be a cutoff somewhere, otherwise WP just becomes a mirror of the net, and what would be the point of that?

Why must you make the Baby Borges cry?
posted by Kattullus at 5:15 PM on September 18, 2008 [3 favorites]


Is there anything that gets the best funny wikipedia misinformation that has since been removed?

For example the article on jeans said that jeans were good for scuba diving (referencing the add with the mermaids). The Reiser FS file comparison with the column 'murders you wife' is another.

A sort of bash for wikipedia, with length of stay and voting would be nifty.
posted by sien at 5:22 PM on September 18, 2008


That graphic is not the truth about Wikipedia, but it is a truth about Wikipedia. And not, I think, a terribly useful truth. At best, the graphic is facile social commentary, rather than a condemnation of Wikipedia.

Let's stipulate that the numbers in the graphic are correct. They probably aren't exactly right, because popular articles can expand and change quite a bit in a short period of time, but the basic idea remains more or less intact. Let's further stipulate that a larger number of words actually means that an article has a higher information density than one that has fewer words, though this isn't always true either.

What matters it if Wikipedia doesn't reflect the high-brow culture? Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia written by people from all walks of life. The world is generally not a haven of high-brow culture. Far many more millions of people are interested in Star Wars' Emperor Palpatine than in Rome's Emperor Constantine. Should all those millions of people be ashamed of themselves for taking a stronger interest in semi-current popular entertainment than in some long-dead Roman leader? Should Wikipedia castigate those millions for their misguided enjoyment? Should it take on a holy quest to force people to be more interested in hallowed subjects of history and science, instead of popular culture, by enforcing rules on which subjects get more page space or views? Is this Wikipedia's mission?

No, it is not. If it tried to force the issue with strict rules about article length based on historic significance (apparently as decided by a select few with a healthy opinion of their knowledgebase), Wikipedia would quickly collapse as a justly-deserved failure.

But put all the high culture versus low culture arguments aside and a key point remains. The articles on Constantine are written and available for everyone to read (and improve). This should be taken as a good thing. Why then a sneering graphic? Is there a contest of which we do not know? Do the words in Palpatine's article somehow diminish the words in Constantine's? Do they cast doubt upon that information, or dilute Constantine's importance simply because the article word count for Palpatine is higher than the word count for Constantine? Is the page on Constantine in battle with the page on Palpatine? Perhaps longer words are more efficient fighters and can better kill the hordes of shorter words, thereby leading to a Constantine victory in the end. No? Then where is the harm and what is the complaint?

So here's a suggestion: if a perceived imbalance about article length versus subject importance bothers you, consider adding content to articles on the "superior" subjects. Maybe we'll all learn a thing or two.
posted by mdevore at 11:06 PM on September 18, 2008


Deletion or not, a this is the truth about Wikipedia.

Uhh, orthogonality, does that link still show what it did when you posted it? I sure hope not. It now points to a compilation of shock images. NSFW, maybe NSFhuman beings in general.

Just don't open it, basically.
posted by lifeless at 2:48 AM on September 19, 2008


That graphic is not the truth about Wikipedia, but it is a truth about Wikipedia...consider adding content to articles on the "superior" subjects.

Surely you meant "posterior" subjects.

I don't know exactly what shit is, but I know it when I see it.
posted by twoleftfeet at 2:55 AM on September 19, 2008


The image orthogonality linked to was originally a chart comparing word counts between articles on trivial and important subjects, like Michaelangelo the artist vs. Michaelangelo the ninja turtle.

This being Encyclopedia Dramatica, of course, some troll saw the incoming Mefi hits and just had to edit the image to point to Goatse and Friends.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:03 AM on September 19, 2008


some troll saw the incoming Mefi hits and just had to edit the image to point to Goatse and Friends.

Oddly enough, this still made sense to me within the context of this discussion.

Why shouldn't Goatse & Friends be just as important as any other topic? Why, really? I don't know.

Maybe because I'm not four years old. Still.... why? Why is it that we know that certain types of knowledge are worth preserving and other types of knowledge should be discarded.

And why do I think that MeFi can answer this?
posted by twoleftfeet at 3:14 AM on September 19, 2008


This is probably what othogonality meant. (Goatse kiddies get off my lawn!)
posted by twoleftfeet at 3:32 AM on September 19, 2008


That's not the same image, but it's in the same spirit. The original one had svtisl word counts from the articles, I think.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:39 AM on September 19, 2008


Rhaomi writes "The image orthogonality linked to was originally a chart comparing word counts between articles on trivial and important subjects, like Michaelangelo the artist vs. Michaelangelo the ninja turtle.

"This being Encyclopedia Dramatica, of course, some troll saw the incoming Mefi hits and just had to edit the image to point to Goatse and Friends."


Yes, that's what happened. My apologies to anyone clicking the link. I'd have apologized sooner, had I not been banned for the link. And my thanks to Rhaomi for deducing what happened and explaining it.
posted by orthogonality at 1:19 AM on September 20, 2008


Wow, you got (temporarily) banned for the image redirect? Not to sound Mefi-litist, but I figured you'd been around long enough that the mods wouldn't immediately assume hostile intent and go for the jugular. Glad you got it sorted out, at any rate.

And you know, I have some firsthand experience here... I got kicked off a forum I'd been a member of for quite awhile after linking to ED's article on furries (and during a discussion about furries, no less). It's a treacherous place.

There was another member of that same forum who got burned far worse. He had anger issues and was obsessed with 4chan and /b/, and when he got on their bad side they harassed him a lot. In turn he participated as one of the anonymous sources in the infamous Fox News exposé of the 4chan subculture. Long story short, they figured out who he was and destroyed his life. They've still got an extensive dossier on him on ED full of pictures and personal info. And we were witness to the whole thing. It was pretty disturbing.

So basically I'm steering clear of all that garbage as best I can. It has a habit of ruining anybody who gets too comfortable with it...
posted by Rhaomi at 2:10 AM on September 20, 2008


Weapons of the Imperium (Warhammer 40,000) (deleted 09 Jul 2008 at 22:21)

somewhere, a very lonely little kid who has put a lot of effort into all those weapons descriptions is silently weeping tonight, secretly wishing he were a jock hunting for tittens instead.
posted by krautland at 2:13 AM on September 20, 2008


« Older Quark-Gluon Plasma   |   We admire your work Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments