A frank exchange of views

January 28, 2010 6:14 PM

Wikipedia editors debate the merits of speedy deletion of of thousands of poorly referenced BLPs (Biographies of Living Persons).
posted by ovvl (71 comments total)

Wikipedia editors discuss the particulars of BLTs.
posted by swift at 6:23 PM on January 28, 2010 [10 favorites]

Wikipedia editors discuss the particulars of DLPs
posted by persona at 6:27 PM on January 28, 2010

Non notable hammer. That's the deletion reason that the wikipedians gave when I made a page for the Hammer of Glory. After a relay by bike, foot and roller skate, it was used by the mayor of Philadelphia to tap the opening keg at Philly Beer Week. It was on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and on TV news. I guess Wikipedia is in danger of running out of room.
posted by fixedgear at 6:31 PM on January 28, 2010 [13 favorites]

Non notable hammer.

Well, I mean, there are a lot of much more notable hammers, obviously.
posted by GuyZero at 6:33 PM on January 28, 2010 [3 favorites]

Mike Hammer, and Hammersmith Odeon, for instance.
posted by FelliniBlank at 6:34 PM on January 28, 2010 [3 favorites]

MC Hammer, Hammerstein Ballroom, Ham or cheese...
posted by unwordy at 6:37 PM on January 28, 2010 [2 favorites]

Don't forget M.C. Hammer.
posted by HabeasCorpus at 6:38 PM on January 28, 2010 [1 favorite]

Wikipedia moderators are the Homeowners' Association Boardmembers of the internet.
posted by amuseDetachment at 6:38 PM on January 28, 2010 [59 favorites]

Kelsey Hammer, too.
posted by ORthey at 6:39 PM on January 28, 2010

a.k.a. "I'm bored. What haven't we had a big drag-out wikiwar about yet?"
posted by MikeHarris at 6:39 PM on January 28, 2010

I guess Wikipedia is in danger of running out of room.

I think the legions of obsessed Wikipedia editors are simply running out of things to do. I mean, the thing is pretty much complete. There are now mature entries on pretty much everything of importance, and so you have an army of people, having no content to add themselves, make themselves look useful by going around and deleting stuff.

The Wikipedia page for Impulse Tracker was deleted, because of "no credible sources". This is a well known piece of software, that was used by many people, for many years, and there are still sites up there full of music files for it. There are dozens of players out there for its files. I've got one on my iPhone. Contributors provided sources that mentioned the software, mentioned music created with it, mentioned artists who used it, yet a Wikipedia editor still decided that the software wasn't "important enough", so it got killed off. Very, very weird.
posted by Jimbob at 6:41 PM on January 28, 2010 [11 favorites]

Maxwell's Silver Hammer
posted by cmgonzalez at 6:44 PM on January 28, 2010 [1 favorite]

There's a Wikipedia:Meta page called Why a cabal is perceived (for more on what Wikipedia:Meta is), in that essay there's the saddest thing I've read about Wikipedia (and I've read a lot of sad things about Wikipedia). It's an explanation as to why two classes of people might think there's a Wikipedia cabal. Two passsages are particularly striking, one from each section, though the whole thing merits reading.

Here's the part about Exopedians, who edit articles and write content, but don't engage in the community, that's stuck with me:

But when the work of an Exopedian is challenged, they often end up on the lower hand. If they are in a conflict, they will often neglect to file 3RRs and garner defense based on history and reasoning at ArbCom or the admin noticeboard.

If the other side knows how to use the Wikipedia namespace, or communicate more effectively, their opinion will come out in "victory." There may not be a cabal, but there is a general attitude, or zeitgeist, which moves the way judgments and actions are made.

Here's the sad part from the bit about Metapedians, whose main concern is the Wikipedian community:

Why are processes and rules so often thrown out with the bath water? If any of the inner workings of Wikipedia, including Wikipedians themselves, get in the way of the encyclopedia's function and quality, the WP:IAR corollary is used as an emergency shutoff button. The community behind Wikipedia may become corrupt, die, or something equally horrible, but as long as the articles retain their quality few outside of Wikipedia will notice.

If that's in any way an accurate description of how Wikipedia function, then it's no wonder it seems so crazy to outsiders. That's an extremely stressful environment to function in.
posted by Kattullus at 6:45 PM on January 28, 2010 [5 favorites]

I kind of feel for the Wiki people, actually.

They get attacked for not being credible, then they get attacked for trying to clean up things that don't seem credible. I personally think it's a pretty amazing resource.

I doubt it will ever be "complete" though. I mean, there are a lot of things in the world.
posted by drjimmy11 at 6:45 PM on January 28, 2010 [2 favorites]

I doubt it will ever be "complete" though. I mean, there are a lot of things in the world.

It can't ever be "complete", but it's over the hump now, past the rapid growth phase, which has brought in a change in the dynamics of how the insiders focus their attention.
posted by Jimbob at 6:48 PM on January 28, 2010 [3 favorites]

Yeah, it's a damned shame what's happening to wikipedia, with these assholes going round deleting every other thing. It's transforming it from some kind of amazing, Borgesian dream into a pedestrian, petty, political crap-fest, running by a small autocracy of narrow-minded fools.

This said, I still love wikipedia with all my heart. It's amazing, and I use it (as a reader) literally every day. But the barrier to entry just keeps getting higher, and I honestly don't think it's a good thing.
posted by smoke at 6:52 PM on January 28, 2010 [6 favorites]

The Wikipedia page for Impulse Tracker was deleted, because of "no credible sources".

There's still time to save the Scream Tracker entry.
posted by swift at 6:53 PM on January 28, 2010

The gas-guzzling, luxury SUV, General Motors Hammer.
posted by DU at 6:57 PM on January 28, 2010

Yeah, it's a damned shame what's happening to wikipedia, with these assholes going round deleting every other thing. It's transforming it from some kind of amazing, Borgesian dream into a pedestrian, petty, political crap-fest, running by a small autocracy of narrow-minded fools.^{[citation needed]}
posted by DU at 6:58 PM on January 28, 2010 [8 favorites]

It can't ever be "complete", but it's over the hump now, past the rapid growth phase

As someone who has contributed to many, many Wikipedia articles, I can tell you that simply having an article for every conceivable substantive topic is very different from having an authoritative, balanced, well-referenced, grammatically correct article for every conceivable substantive topic.

There's still a lot of work to be done, internecine edit squabbling notwithstanding.
posted by killdevil at 6:59 PM on January 28, 2010 [2 favorites]

This was a couple of years ago, but I (very innocently) made a change to a page about a musician I liked -- it listed the wrong music label for one of her albums, so I corrected it.

I then received a nasty-gram from the "protector" of that page chiding me for making the change and that These Things Needed to Be Discussed First (luckily, someone else spoke up and said "The change was a good one -- it made it correct. What is your problem?").

I still like Wikipedia and still consult it -- it's an easy way to get facts quickly (like the age of someone, what happened in a certain episode of a show, etc.) but that experience did kind of put me off editing anything.

And I think that's really sad. I like the concept of Wikipedia, but I'm not surprised it has become a place for people to feel important.
posted by darksong at 7:00 PM on January 28, 2010 [8 favorites]

There's still a lot of work to be done, internecine edit squabbling notwithstanding.

Like translations into other languages. Or, in the case of the math articles, English.
posted by DU at 7:09 PM on January 28, 2010 [2 favorites]

a.k.a. "I'm bored. What haven't we had a big drag-out wikiwar about yet?

a.k.a. "I'm bored. What haven't we had a big drag-out mefiwar about yet?

Personally, I don't read the articles, I just look at it for the pictures.
posted by Sk4n at 7:12 PM on January 28, 2010

A blog post by Jason Scott (from December). A lot of the "fancruft" (say, star wars lore) has been deleted, but every Simpsons episode still has its own entry, AFAIK. I sometimes have a feeling that the anti-fancruft policy is a pro-wikia (and, therefore, pro-revenue-for-Jimbo) policy.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 7:14 PM on January 28, 2010 [3 favorites]

eh, Wikipedia is now a big massive bureaucracy and acts as such.

What is wrong or surprising about that?
posted by unSane at 7:23 PM on January 28, 2010 [1 favorite]

There's still a lot of work to be done, internecine edit squabbling notwithstanding.

And sadly, the shift from community-driven to committee-driven is what stands in the way of that work getting done now.

The whole value of a community-driven encyclopedia is most obviously seen in the fancruft: the minor, notable-to-a-small-group content. The big advantage Wikipedia had was breadth of knowledge; that was its most effective counter to the lack of official expertise generating its content.

The deletionists cut right into the heart of that primary virtue of Wikipedia by trying to make notability a criteria. Non-notability was Wikipedia's strength, not its weakness.
posted by fatbird at 7:43 PM on January 28, 2010 [27 favorites]

There's something I've noticed and been wanting to say about Wikipedia. Let's see if I can put this into words.

In the beginning, the internet was without form, and void. There were a few protocols out there, but no one single thing that defined the internet at the application layer. How you used the net was defined by what you knew about it, what servers you knew about, etc. Information about "what's out there" was passed on mostly socially.

Then came the web, and it was still that way, at first. I remember there was a book called "The Internet Yellow Pages" for a while. At some point, search engines really started to spring up and come into heavy use. You would search for something on Yahoo or Altavista or whatever, and then sift through pages of stuff to get to a page that contained some mention of the actual information you were looking for.

The problem is, millions of individual pages each containing a snippet of info about something, each written by one person alone and with their credentials alone, indexed only by search engines, has never been a very organized way to store information. If I want to know the size of Jupiter, I search for Jupiter (size is a pretty ambiguous term), and sift through results to find several pages containing the size (most "Jupiter"-related pages won't, and some might not be about the planet), then check them against each other in case one guy's a doofus.

One day, Wikipedia comes into existence (or maybe it was just the first to get a critical mass of users, I dunno), and it nails this amazing idea of having just ONE site to index all information. Each possible "thing" or subject has exactly one page. If the term could mean more than one thing, then there's a disambiguation page. So, this one page has the sum of everyone's favorite information about the subject, so it's like the union of all personal web pages about that subject. And it's editable by everyone, so incorrect stuff can be fixed, or at the very least, controversial claims can be identified because there's a fight over them.

So, quickly, people intuitively realize that Wikipedia allows the entire content of the internet to be stored in a new way, a way that's better on many fronts. More structured, easier to find what you want, easier to spot controversy and get a more common, less idiosyncratic viewpoint, and a lot of duplication is removed because there's just one page for each thing.

The problem is, the guy who made the site stupidly tacked "pedia" onto the end of its name, and propounded some silly, arbitrary notion that Wikipedia was supposed to resemble "an encyclopedia". So, a bunch of sticklers get it in their heads that it should look like an encyclopedia and contain only the kind of information that would be in an encyclopedia rather than the kind that would be in the internet. This runs directly into conflict with people who are trying to replace the entire web with Wikipedia, treating it more as a general system for indexing information than specifically an encyclopedia.

Unfortunately, neither group can just go make their own site with their own rules and be happy, because the fact that there's only one and it gets all the foot traffic is a big part of what makes it work. It's like the URL has been standardized. When I want something I type "www.wikipedia.org", and unless the site gets so FUBAR that I can't use it, I'm not likely to change that habit. Since that foot traffic is where content comes from, there's a conflict.

And I don't see what's so great about putting a lovely, spell-checked encyclopedia on the internet, so I tend to side with the inclusionists. To me, the site is far more useful as a Google substitute.

(If this was a stupidly long post to say something that's obvious to everyone else, sorry about that!)
posted by Xezlec at 7:50 PM on January 28, 2010 [24 favorites]

No, I hear you Xezlec. Mediawiki has, contained within it, the mechanisms to make sure the cruft doesn't ruin the good stuff. Having pages about every little thing in no way detracts from the pages about every big thing.
posted by Jimbob at 8:05 PM on January 28, 2010

I'm with Xelzec. I see no reason in this day and age of multi-terrabyte tape cartridges to ever delete anything except for ethical reasons (you're lying, fantasizing, slandering or otherwise warping the truth.)

Hell, you can even have both POVs of controversial topics completely and exhaustively represented... and more importantly, you should.

Wikipedia is larger and more important than any encyclopedia... the incredibly cheap cost to produce and distribute articles means that it can be more complete than any other body of work. Deleting anything for non-notability* is vandalism, burning books from the Library of Alexandria because the librarian though they were boring.

(*except in case of ethical breach or obvious lack of sanity or perspective on the part of the contributor, and it better be reeeal obvious)

Wikipedia is a bright, shining moment of human excellence in an otherwise dark decade. It's a shame the nit-pickers and petty-power-trippers are spitting on the flame... they keep that up, and it will sputter and go dark.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:05 PM on January 28, 2010 [9 favorites]

Here's an attempt to clarify a couple of Wikipedia policy things, based on my understanding as a long-time editor who has intentionally stayed out of internal policy debates.

The much-criticized notability guideline is closely related to the verifiability policy — if a subject has not been covered by multiple reasonably reliable secondary sources (in other words, if it isn't notable), you can't write a reasonably verifiable article about that subject. This makes sense to me.

Most articles don't quite live up to the verifiability policy, but most editors let that slide. It's not always worth spending your free time to fix up a long article about a long-defunct union. It's good enough; another editor can always do it later if they feel like it.

But editors aren't supposed to let Biographies of Living Persons articles slide. They get special by-the-rules treatment because "material we publish about living people can seriously affect their lives and the lives of their families, colleagues, and friends". As far as I can tell, the linked debate is about how strictly to draw that line.
posted by dreamyshade at 8:10 PM on January 28, 2010 [6 favorites]

The obvious technological solution is to make wikipedia more transparent. It's not like deleted pages are deleted from the database, right? All wikipedia needs is a, "this page has been deleted. Click Here to view it." link.

Really, this is a technical problem. There should be no easy way to delete wikipedia pages.
posted by Richard Daly at 8:31 PM on January 28, 2010

if a subject has not been covered by multiple reasonably reliable secondary sources (in other words, if it isn't notable), you can't write a reasonably verifiable article about that subject

Sure, but deleting these pages doesn't make any sense. It's counterproductive. Unless you know, for sure, that there aren't sources around that could be used to improve the article, then you're just eliminating any chance that it could be improved.

I've seen lots of pages deleted based on some editor's perception of what was "encyclopedic" or "notable," and it was very clearly a gut decision on their part, made without anything more than a casual Google search (if that). Article doesn't fit some sort of idea they have in mind, of things that ought to be in Wikipedia? Article doesn't currently have enough sources to satisfy some arbitrary standard? Article gets deleted — and then there's virtually no chance that a better article will ever be written.

There are people who have made it their business to be the book-burners of the digital world; they contribute little, but simply destroy the work of others. The Internet equivalent of the kids who preferred to stamp on others' sandcastles rather than building their own. And a lot of them have found a home on Wikipedia.

At this point I don't know why anyone would bother to write a new article for Wikipedia; why spend the time and effort writing something that some jerkoff might just delete, if you're not willing to keep a constant eye on it and play the Wikipedia bureaucracy game to defend it? (Not that, as an outsider, you'd have that much of a chance anyway.) I don't think that's what most people have in mind when they contribute their time to a wiki. Writing something that might get edited, hopefully improved over time, is one thing. Putting your effort into something just so that somebody can play amateur lawyer and figure out a reason to destroy it? No, thanks — not for me, anyway.

It wouldn't be quite so offensive if 'deletions' weren't so permanent and absolute; if they just superseded the top revision of an article with a blank template or something, so that the previous version would at least still be around somewhere, if people cared to look. With some very minor exceptions for clearly illegal or libelous material, I can't see any reason why this shouldn't be how things get "deleted." There's a creepy sort of Stalinism to the current process; it's not just about removing material from the Wikipedia normal users see, but really wiping it out, destroying all evidence that it ever existed.

That attitude, the whole obsession of what's "encyclopedic" and deserving of inclusion ... all of that goes directly against what excited me about Wikipedia, that I thought was Wikipedia, when I first heard about it. I'm not sure if Wikipedia changed, or if just never was what I and a lot of other people thought it was. But it's too bad. It's a good resource in the form it's in, and I'll still use it as long as it's there, but it could have been so much more.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:40 PM on January 28, 2010 [8 favorites]

The other day I was watching Gun Markets of Pakistan on VBS.TV (I know, sorry). It was a typical Viceland thing, incredibly dangerous place that no one ever goes to talking about something unbelievably cool yet really getting no substance. The place they visited, Darra Adam Khel, I never heard of before but basically since the British arrived they've done nothing but make guns. The Wikipedia article sums it up perfectly:

"The town has just one street lined with shops. Except for the odd tea stalls or butcher shop, every single one of them is a gun shop. There are no women in the Bazaar. Above the traffic noise is the cracking sound of small arms fire by the shop keepers; Product Testing!"

In fact when reading the article, with all its rough edges, you really are brought back to that magical time when you realize This is the Internet. There's a gun imaginarium in Pakistan? Holy shit, that's amazing. I'll never go there, fuck I'll never go to Pakistan, yet here I am, reading the travelogue that describes in the same breathless wonder I would have. Fuck, I probably would have included the bit of history the exuberant taxi driver told me, "We used to do heroin, but our tribal leaders decided no, only guns."

And really why I know a well researched article could trump this, I'm sure if the New Yorker sent EO Wells to Darra Adam Khel we'd have a 10x better article. I know if I spent 2 years pouring over existing articles I could put together something great, well cited and Wikipedia approved. But for obscure things on the edge like this, nothing can really trump it. Yet I know a Wikipedia editor could wipe out a good 50% of the article and sterilize it with the efficiency of a Jane report.

Wikipedia is really, really good for some things, but near the edges it breaks down and breaks down bad. It does not need to be this way. Fixed Gear's hammer is the future of that Darra Adam Khel article. Wasn't cited? You don't know what it is? Not obviously a troll? Let it fucking go, this is the internet. I know if I look up what an apple is on Wikipedia I'm going to get a hell of an article. If look up a hammer used in a Philadelphia keg party, well buyer beware, it doesn't mean its not valuable.

I realize where some of their editors are coming from, I think their positions are valid. Put up a warning if it makes you feel better, but for the love of God don't delete.
posted by geoff. at 9:00 PM on January 28, 2010 [3 favorites]

Notability
Wikipedia is a response to the problem of unlimited information, an attempt to organize and categorize the most important things, to make sense of the flood of information on the Internet. There will always will be debate about what is important, it's inherent, there is nothing wrong with that, it is part of the process - otherwise we might as well call it "Everything" (already done).

Civility
The part that bothers me is the process, it is uncivil and doesn't have to be that way. It comes down to a culture of honor, where reputation, rhetorical skill and who you know determines outcomes. Despite all the Wikipedia laws in place, it is not a culture of law because there is little enforcement, it is up to you to enforce the laws for yourself. It is the Wild West, or 18th century Scotland, or 21st century Afghanistan. It can be a very stressful and uncivil environment to work in; it can also be very communal, tribal even, as groups work together. Until the "security" problems are resolved, Wikipedia will always be a bunch of Highlanders in kilts fighting it out.
posted by stbalbach at 9:35 PM on January 28, 2010

I've seen lots of pages deleted based on some editor's perception of what was "encyclopedic" or "notable," and it was very clearly a gut decision on their part, made without anything more than a casual Google search (if that).

That goes to the heart of my main problem with Wikipedia: the editors don't seem to have a strong idea how to use other basic Internet resources like Archive.org, Google Books, A9's full-text book search, Google New Archive, etc., etc., where the information for many of these deleted non-biographical articles can be found in trillions and trillions of words. The list of free full-text resources where this stuff can be found is vast.
posted by Mo Nickels at 10:15 PM on January 28, 2010 [1 favorite]

Oh, they know how to use them, they just see it as the problem of whoever created the articles of whoever wants to keep it.
posted by Artw at 10:27 PM on January 28, 2010 [1 favorite]

I read Wikipedia for the pictures.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:50 PM on January 28, 2010

I used to be a strict inclusionist but as of late, due to being involved in a lot of edit wars and such recently, I find myself drifting to the other side. I probably revert around 50 entries every day because of vandalism and make a handful of constructive edits at the same time (fixing prose, formatting things properly, and so on) but whenever I come across a biography about a living person that's just "Jim Blow owns the best ever real estate company in Austin and gives lots of money to homeless cats" I want to delete it. No citations, no links to anything, nothing shows up in a quick internet search, reads like a vanity article or an advertisement so we should keep this why?

Look at it this way, a lot of people do work really hard at this (the work I do is repetitive, not difficult) and leaving an article like the above (based on a real article about a guy in Seattle) seems insulting (not to mention the various WP guidelines it violates). Maybe I shouldn't be insulted but I'm guessing a lot of dedicated editors feel something similar.

Or this, you come across that article while going through the list of recent changes looking for vandalism and you see that someone has added "christi blow sucks gay dick" on the end, again, and instead of reverting the vandalism, again, why not propose the article for speedy deletion since it's a worthless article anyway? It won't actually save you any work in the future (I estimate that there are at least 5 cases of vandalism every second) but at least you're no longer throwing away good effort on a bad article. Right? Maybe?


And then also like dreamyshade says "They get special by-the-rules treatment because 'material we publish about living people can seriously affect their lives and the lives of their families, colleagues, and friends'". So there's a kind of moral responsibility here, at least toward living people which is the topic of concern in this Metafilter post, the bigger debate of inclusion vs. deletion should regard BLPs separately .
posted by bfootdav at 11:00 PM on January 28, 2010 [3 favorites]

If you want to fight deletionism go here, pick and article, and add some solid references to it. Nothing else works, certainly not debating the merits of the article or complaining or whining or anything. Add the references, that's what counts.

The best thing is that it leaves the deletionists pissing and whining that it isn't fair and blah, blah, blah, because once the artictle has solid references the rules are against them.
posted by Artw at 11:22 PM on January 28, 2010 [2 favorites]

> The Wikipedia page for Impulse Tracker was deleted, because of "no credible sources"

i still hold on to a bunch of bombastic .it mods i made in the 90s, boy did i like the chemical brothers. maybe i should send them to the wikipedia editors? impulse tracker was awesome!
posted by valdesm at 11:27 PM on January 28, 2010

In addition, if you see an article listed for deletion that could be saved by adding references put the {{rescue}} tag on it, and it will appear on that list. It's probably worth explaining why you think it could be saved on the AfD page of course.

AfD is a highly visible process and gives a lot of opportunities for an article to be saved, and so you'll see deletionists attempting to avoid it by using the speedy deletion tags or just blanking and redirecting. I'd recommend removing the speedys and rolling back the blankings, and insiting on an AfD. Hell, even start the AfD yourself - there's not much they can doto an article while an AfD is in progress, and at least it will have a fighting chance.

And then theres the deletionist who just like cutting articles to shreds and arguingover every last sentence of it. Those guys are the most tedious of all. If your article has the attention of those fuckers then there is not much that can be done over than citing the hell out of all teh important bits and accpeting that everything else will probably get trashed.
posted by Artw at 11:29 PM on January 28, 2010 [1 favorite]

Another nifty deletionist trick to keep an eye out for: Removing almost all the text from an article then nominating it for deletion. It's always worth checking the history of suspiciously short articles in the deletion queue for this.
posted by Artw at 12:49 AM on January 29, 2010

Looks like the Rescue talk page has some discussion of the BLP mass-delete, and someone is putting together a tool to help with recovery of the articles.
posted by Artw at 1:01 AM on January 29, 2010

Another nifty deletionist trick to keep an eye out for: Removing almost all the text from an article then nominating it for deletion. It's always worth checking the history of suspiciously short articles in the deletion queue for this.

The fact that these tricks are well known is itself evidence that Wikipedia is no longer community driven--it's run by apparatchiks fighting bureaucratic wars.
posted by fatbird at 1:06 AM on January 29, 2010 [6 favorites]

It's certainly why I participate less and less.

There's not a sadder site on wikipedia than some enthusiast coming along and trying to build a decent article on something they know about, only to have some gang of deletionist busy bodies come along and wikilawyer it into oblivion whilst repeatedly telling the person who is trying to add information to what a bad person they are and then trying to get them blocked if they object.
posted by Artw at 1:11 AM on January 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

But when the work of an Exopedian is challenged, they often end up on the lower hand. If they are in a conflict, they will often neglect to file 3RRs and garner defense based on history and reasoning at ArbCom or the admin noticeboard.

It's like one of those "who said it?" quizzes, except that instead of choosing between Obama and Hitler, you're choosing between Wikipedia and Scientology.
posted by Lazlo at 1:48 AM on January 29, 2010 [5 favorites]

Yeah, that's my impression of the people who run the site as well. A gang of petty bureaucrats who obsess about little details are ruining the site. I'd always love to start my own version.

Start with every article that exists currently (You can download database dumps as a starting point)

Then come up with a really good GUI that lets people edit without knowing markdown. Markdown was a good idea for simple pages, but Wikipedia has so much complex notation that it actually becomes worse then an XML format because at least with XML you have named tags. With markdown you have all kinds of crazy little character notations.

But either way, most people would get to edit via a GUI, and editing would be as easy as typing into word.

I would be much more inclusiveness and solve the "BLP" problem by letting non-celebrities control their own pages.
posted by delmoi at 2:07 AM on January 29, 2010

Wikipedia's little acronyms for deletion reasons make me think of the criminal-code abbreviations used by the "organs" of the Stalinist state, as described in The Gulag Archipelago.

(Reasons for deletion: VAD (praising American democracy); VAT (praising American technique)) etc.

Not that the systems are comparable, but they are/were both bloated, absurd bureaucracies based on dubious notions of ideological purity.
posted by WPW at 3:13 AM on January 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

Every organization which starts out with noble or fun aims is eventually ruined by petty tyrants; they're attracted like moths to flame. All you can do is take a core of "true believers" and start again, at the same time knowing it's just a matter of time.
posted by maxwelton at 3:41 AM on January 29, 2010

Not to break everyone's hearts, but I was discussing this six years ago.

Nothing's changed, just variations. Pointing out this outrage vs. this stupidity and them comparing it to this other insanity is even more of a timesink than wikipedia itself.

tl;dr: On Wikipedia, deleting and destroying is considered as heroic an act as creating and maintaining. That is the basic, simple truth.
posted by jscott at 3:42 AM on January 29, 2010 [3 favorites]

"the thing is pretty much complete. There are now mature entries on pretty much everything of importance"

Around three million articles on English Wikipedia, but mere thousands that can be regarded as finished (i.e. Featured status or close to it). So rather than "pretty much complete" I'd say it's only just begun.
Amongst the psychology articles (for example) there are plenty that are actively misleading or lack key references. I couldn't disagree more with the idea that it's "pretty much complete". Maybe it will be get closer in a couple of generations, but there's a staggering amount of work to do.

"And then theres the deletionist who just like cutting articles to shreds and arguing over every last sentence of it. Those guys are the most tedious of all."

That's the review process. Personally I want an encyclopedia that has had every last sentence argued over. Yes it's tedious, but it's how you make a reliable article.
posted by infobomb at 5:43 AM on January 29, 2010

You want to see where Wikipedia is still lacking?

Watch any 60 minute TV documentary on a subject. This will be as dumbed down a treatment as you can find. Then see how much of the info is contained in the relevant wikipedia article.
posted by smackfu at 6:16 AM on January 29, 2010

> only to have some gang of deletionist busy bodies come along and wikilawyer it into oblivion whilst repeatedly telling the person who is trying to add information to what a bad person they are

I've only had this happen a couple of times (the wikilawyering, that is; nobody told me I was a bad person), and I've made a lot of edits and created a fair number of articles. Yes, it's unpleasant, but it's ridiculous to claim that it defines Wikipedia or that Wikipedia is unusable because of it. Every human institution has problems; it's one thing to call attention to them and try to make them better, quite another to go around loudly trumpeting "THIS SUCKS!" But every thread involving Wikipedia has its quota of bitter people who feel the need to proclaim their terminal alienation from it.

> I mean, the thing is pretty much complete. There are now mature entries on pretty much everything of importance

This is one of the most ludicrous statements I've ever read on MeFi.
posted by languagehat at 7:45 AM on January 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

The field of Manga and Anime has been extensively documented with many references!

Seriously, one of the worst deletionist trolls I know of is all about ridiculous overlong anime articles with thousands of articles. They'll happily wander into articles in fields they no nothing about and declare them worthless and unworthy withoutdoing any research, but Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne is serious business and requires effort.
posted by Artw at 7:56 AM on January 29, 2010

Artw is absolutely right. It's amazing how many anime or manga articles are at featured status, when you have things like articles on states, presidents, and whole countries that may not even have the "good article" status. This isn't an indictment of manga or anime, but the problem is that the interest just isn't there for a lot of topics to dedicate any amount of effort to citation and fleshing out.

I really don't care for the Deletionist, as I take a very encompassing view of Wikipedia. It can easily contain all sorts of information and the existence of that information doesn't degrade from the accessibility or quality of the other existing information. There are simply editors out there who feel the best expression of their time and energy is to question the actions of their peers.
posted by Atreides at 8:21 AM on January 29, 2010

languagehat: But every thread involving Wikipedia has its quota of bitter people who feel the need to proclaim their terminal alienation from it.

Wikipedia is having problems right now. The number of active editors has plateaued and article growth is slowing. I think that this alienation, whether justified or not, is contributing to this issue. Wikipedia used to be very open and now it's perceived as closing down.

I don't let it stop me. When I have something to contribute and the time to do so I go ahead and contribute. I'm not very active, but I haven't run afoul of any craziness yet. But I can understand how it would keep others away. I've been online for a long time, I have a pretty thick skin, but I remember a time when I didn't and stuff like goes on in Wikipedia really got to me.

I think it's a big problem for Wikipedia. I don't think it's gonna kill it, but it will make its utility less than it otherwise would be.
posted by Kattullus at 8:28 AM on January 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

I used to be semi-active on Wikipedia, until I realized this: Wikipedia is an MMO for bureaucrats.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 8:35 AM on January 29, 2010 [16 favorites]

So true. Like the equivalent of grinding is adding "citation required" to every single sentence.
posted by smackfu at 9:40 AM on January 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

It's interesting to see other people bringing up the theory that "Wikipedia's basically finished, so now all these editors are running around devouring their own tails out of desperation." I've noticed two things becoming more prevalent over the last year or so:

1. Complaint flags at the tops of articles.

It seems like at least 85% of Wikipedia articles have flags at the top now. I always think "If it's such a big problem that you were moved to flag this article, then maybe you should take the time to fix it." (Sort of the opposite of FIAMO.)

2. Atrocious grammar.

We're talking way beyond the level of dangling participles. I have seen entire paragraphs so mangled that I literally couldn't make sense of them.

When the fix is obvious, I'll take the time to edit and correct it. But there are a lot of sentences so confusing that I can't even tell what the original author meant. How do you correct gibberish?
posted by ErikaB at 10:50 AM on January 29, 2010

A lot of deletionists and point pushers use complaint flags as a way of showing their disaproval of an article when they have no other course for disrupting it.
posted by Artw at 10:52 AM on January 29, 2010

Personally, I feel it's a huge barrier to entry that they moved from "anyone can edit articles" to "anyone can add properly cited material". I don't even know how to add a cite in wiki language.
posted by smackfu at 10:53 AM on January 29, 2010

It almost seems to be a point of honour amongst bureaucracy-inclined editors not to help anyone on that point, and to act like it's an utterly obvious thing when it's not.

FWIW, and without getting into the complexities of the {{cite}} template, anything that you put in site <ref> tags will appear in the pages reference list, including links in regular wiki format. The link and a brief description should be enough for teh purposes of saving articles, though if you want to make a meal out of it you really can.

If there is not a pre-existing list of references on the page add the following:

==References==
{{reflist}}
posted by Artw at 10:58 AM on January 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

Xezlec, what about a massive sister wiki that mirrors Wikipedia but allows unlimited POV contribution and doesn't delete anything except slander and obscenities? It would be an uber hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy and would allow wikipedia to embrace its role as an encyclopedia.
posted by aesacus at 3:53 PM on January 29, 2010

Unfortunately it would actually turn into TV Tropes pretty fast.
posted by Artw at 3:54 PM on January 29, 2010

It's not like deleted pages are deleted from the database, right? All wikipedia needs is a, "this page has been deleted. Click Here to view it." link.

Well, they may not be technically deleted from the database but they are effectively deleted from the site for anyone but admins. So no, there couldn't be such a link. I think the stated policy for this is that they need a way to handle cases where someone creates an article about a person and includes invasive personal details. If deleted pages were still accessible then that personal information would still be out there. (Although that explanation doesn't address what must be the more likely scenario where someone makes an edit to an otherwise normal pre-existing article containing invasive personal details.)
posted by Rhomboid at 4:08 AM on January 30, 2010

I have as much disillusionment as anyone else. I won’t even bother to nominate what caused the greatest disillusionment, because hateful Jason Scott will just write 650 words explaining how it’s all my fault. He already covered this ground six years ago; why didn’t we pay attention?

But let me tell you what, counterintuitively, has worked: Doing a paper-edit of a the entirety of a particularly long article.

If I apply my editor’s skills to an entire article, at every level from sense to flow to copy, then replace the whole thing with an explanation in the Discussion page about what still needs to be rectified, in every case that edited version becomes the new base for the article. A couple of times, those loose ends I mentioned get cleared up within hours. Otherwise they just stay loose.

This technique does not scale: You have to be an actual experienced editor (using the publishing-industry sense of the term). You need to be willing to donate your time (of a different kind here given it’s a marketable skill for you). You need to find an article that’s big enough to actually rewrite and that you actually give a shit about. Then you have to kind of worry your high-quality work – at least by prevailing Wikipedia standards – might just get reverted. But in my experience it never does.

“Go big or go home” seems to work as a Wikipedia editing strategy.
posted by joeclark at 1:14 PM on January 30, 2010

Rhomboid: “I think the stated policy for this is that they need a way to handle cases where someone creates an article about a person and includes invasive personal details. If deleted pages were still accessible then that personal information would still be out there. (Although that explanation doesn't address what must be the more likely scenario where someone makes an edit to an otherwise normal pre-existing article containing invasive personal details.)”

Yeah, you've pretty much nailed why I think that policy doesn't make sense.

There are a few different scenarios getting mixed up, IMO. One is where an article gets deleted for some everyday procedural reason. Like most of the stuff they torch every day for just not being "encyclopedic" enough. There is no reason at all why this can't be preserved, just outside of the top-level namespace where 99.9% of all users browse.

An argument that such information needs to be expunged because otherwise people might come across it and get bad information fails, because there's tons of bad information in articles' edit histories. Anytime something gets corrected, it's in the edit history. So why shouldn't a typical delete action just create a new, blank version? This is analogous to virtually every SCM version-control system that I've worked with, too; it's not a novel idea. (E.g., if you do "svn rm somefile.txt" in a Subversion-managed repository, when you commit the change you create a new revision with that file gone. Actually expunging a file, giving it the Full Stalin and wiping out any trace of it ... that takes serious effort.)

There might be some merit to the idea that Wikipedia needs some sort of "expungement" mechanism for removing clearly illegal or libelous material that could otherwise be an existential threat to the entire site. However, there's no reason why such power needs to be delegated to more than a tiny handful of individuals; it ought to be a true nuclear option.

It wouldn't take that much to fix some of the more egregious issues with Wikipedia:
(1) Pull the ability to perform physical deletes (or what appear to be physical deletes to a normal user; as opposed to "rv"-ing with a new version) back to the bare minimum staff required to keep the CP and libel under control.
(2) Make some sort of new 'delete' mechanism that's more like reverting a whole article to a blank template, or moves the current article and all its history into a "deleted" namespace, so they'd always be available for other people to pull out and reuse later.
(3) Ratchet down the "omgsourcescitecitecite" stuff; there's no need to try and compete with Britannica anymore — Wikipedia already won, long before the obsession over removing unsourced material (much of which stemmed from people with practical experience and subject-matter expertise, unverifiable as it might have been) began.

Sadly, there doesn't seem to be much interest at the top of the Wikipedia hierarchy to do anything about any of these things — or, really, do anything besides beg for cash.

My guess is that it'll stagger on under its own weight until somebody finally manages to do something better (perhaps starting with a DB dump) and leave the Junior Bureaucrats League to fight amongst themselves.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:13 PM on January 30, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm not a huge fan of Wikipedia, but I still occasionally contribute. On those occasions where the magic grail of citation's been demanded, the Wikipedia Reference Generator's been useful in generating the correct cite codes.
posted by MikeHarris at 12:31 PM on January 31, 2010

Jimbob: You still have a chance to improve the article (located in someone's userspace here) and then move it back, if you're so inclined.

I agree that there's too much deletion of articles simply because they lack sufficient reliable sources. For BLPs, deleting them quickly makes sense from a liability perspective (you don't want potentially libelous or incorrect material on people who can sue you), but for other topics it's really nonsensical. Unfortunately, there's already so much bureaucratic inertia that I doubt it will change unless Jimbo Wales himself steps in.
posted by armage at 8:33 PM on January 31, 2010

Welll... it's worth remembering the other objections to wikipedia... that it's full of irrelevancies and untruths.
posted by Artw at 8:52 PM on January 31, 2010

I have the Wikipedia random page as my homepage and it spews out mostly uninteresting stuff (I now know a lot more about the territorial subdivisions of Poland than I ever thought I would) every once and so often it shows me something amazing and sometimes it just makes me laugh. The latest random page I got was about 19th Century American Baptist missionary to Burma Calista Vinton. Here's the first paragraph:

Calista H. Vinton[1] (19 April 1807- 18 December 1864) was an American Baptist missionary who labored for 30 years in Burma (now known as Myanmar) preaching, teaching and caring amongst the Karen people. Both Calista and her husband Justus Vinton were eminently successful in winning the souls for the Lord."

This is one of those features of Wikipedia that's also sometimes a bug, mostly it's only the people who care a lot about a topic that will write about it.
posted by Kattullus at 11:58 PM on January 31, 2010