[akamaka]

I got involved with the deletion debate over the Go! programming language, and was among a handful of people who actually tried to reason out how Wikipedia's notability policies could be improved.

The fact is that Wikipedia is full of articles about people's own pet research projects which have no users and no impact.

Your arguments are solid and worth thinking about, but as you can see, nobody wants to address the wider problem of Wikipedia's poor notability guidelines directly, and have let this devolve into a flamewar.

[_delirium]

Yeah, this is probably the most disappointing HN flamewar yet, full of outrage and attacks but very little information or people wanting to educate themselves. There's lots of things that can be improved on Wikipedia, but it requires people to: 1) become familiar with how things work; 2) become familiar with why things came to be that way; and 3) come up with workable proposals to improve things that take into account various problems those proposals themselves could cause.

But pitchforks and flamage are easier, I guess. It's embarrassing how similar this response is to what happens when some minor band's article gets proposed for deletion, and all the angry folks from the band's mailing list show up arguing that Wikipedia Fascists Are Damaging Knowledge.

[jarin]

You're assuming that people don't know how Wikipedia works. I think most people who are angry with arbitrary deletion on Wikipedia have probably at some point read through enough of the WP: articles to understand why it's offensive.

[_delirium]

Judging by the discussion so far, I would be willing to wager that most people in fact are unfamiliar and have not read anything.

One experiment that could be useful is for people to just follow the "Articles for deletion" page for a few days when it's not currently focused on something they're personally big fans of. Say, next Monday through Wednesday. Then everyone would be much better informed to explain what's wrong about the process and what to do about it. They'd also have a better understanding about the kind of crap that gets regularly deleted, i.e. why the rules exist in the first place, which is what any reform proposal would have to also account for.

But I think most people are just jumping in because someone said something bad about a thing they're a fan of, hence the mob style.

[knowtheory]

Except that this happens over and over again.

Wikipedia's policies piss everyone off in turn, but it is in turn. The fact that each new community isn't aware of wikipedia's ludicrous policies isn't their fault, since they've had no cause to wrestle with the problems or nuances.

The fact that wikipedians are tired of the debate doesn't mean that they're right, it means that they've done a bad job communicating the problem, dealing with the consequences, and are frankly out of touch with the majority of wikipedia's readers (who outside of a subset of wikipedians thinks deletionism is a good idea?).

The fact that people defending wikipedia on these issues always treat the aggrieved fans/community with such contempt really is part of the problem.

[_delirium]

There are certainly some problems, but I don't think they're all on one side. I think that the fact that people who don't spend any effort understanding the problem or trying to improve things treat Wikipedians with such contempt is also part of the problem.

Figuring out how to write an encyclopedia isn't a particularly easy problem, and a lot of people have spent some effort trying to balance things like, on the one hand, wanting coverage of everything, and on the other hand, not wanting physics kooks spamming up Wikipedia with their fringe theories. Lots of people disagree on how to do it, but I think people should at least make some effort to understand things rather than seeing it through the narrow tunnel vision of "the thing I'm a fan of deserves special treatment and Wikipedians don't see that so they're idiots". As in open-source, it's to some extent a contrib-ocracy; if you don't help improve the encyclopedia at all, but only show up when some external fan community is aggrieved, that sort of "contribution" isn't appreciated any more than it would be at LKML (they get such influxes now and then too, e.g. from fans of a module that wasn't accepted for merging).

> who outside of a subset of wikipedians thinks deletionism is a good idea

I actually see the opposite criticism at least as often! Wikipedia's often attacked in academic literature, and some news stories, for being filled with "Star Wars and Pokemon cruft", and not paying enough attention to reliable sources or people with expertise in various fields. There are also periodic controversies about it including articles on borderline-notable people who object to their inclusion. Most forks, like Larry Sanger's "Citizendium", have been based on the Wikipedia-is-too-loose-with-its-standards criticism, rather than the opposite one. Not that I agree with it, but it does seem to be the most common criticism outside of fan communities.

[cabalamat]

> They'd also have a better understanding about the kind of crap that gets regularly deleted

Most of it isn't crap.

For example, I looked at the top 5 articles listed on 13th February -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

#1 is an internet marketing company. It has a website which verifiably exists. People considering doing business with them would find this useful. It should be kept.

#2 is an academic. That makes the article useful. OTOH, she's hasd death threats and wants the article down. I'm not sure what I'd do here.

#3 is a sportsman. Should be kept: even if he isn't well known, those who do know about him will likely find the article useful.

#4 is about Swiss people in Sri Lanka. If I was Swiss and was considering relocation to Sri Lanka, I might find this useful. Should be kept.

#5 is about "XMLmosaic", something I've never heard of, and has been speedily deleted.

A majority of these articles (at least 60%) are net-useful to humanity and should be kept. If I did a larger sample, I'm sure I'd get similar results.

About 100 articles a day are posted on AfD and most of these (75-80%) are deleted. What good is served by destroying tens of thousands of useful articles every year? None.

[_delirium]

One good thing is that it keeps Wikipedia a tertiary source. I personally have a fairly inclusionist perspective, but my perspective is more or less: Wikipedia should cover anything on which any decent third-party source can be found (and it should point the reader to the source, so they can look it up themselves if they want).

There is of course stuff on which internet users can collect useful information, where no current sources exist to cite, but there's no reason Wikipedia has to be the only wiki on the internet. For example, Know Your Meme is an excellent project to document current internet memes, including via original sleuthing by its editors, who try to track down the history of memes and reconstruct their paths. It's not really a tertiary source summarizing the existing literature though; it's a sociological/historical research project. And it's great that it exists. Why does it have to exist on wikipedia.org, a project that has different goals, which don't include doing original research? Of course, memes should also be covered on Wikipedia, but only when Wikipedia can cite some existing published source documenting the information (a news article, a sociology conference paper, anything really).

I guess it seems perfectly fine to me that there's more than one project on the internet dedicated to collecting knowledge, with different goals; I don't see why Wikipedia has to be the union of all possible wikis. If anything, I would prefer more projects with different goals and approaches to exist, rather than everything being so centralized. That way I can go to Wikipedia if I want the tertiary-source take on internet memes, and I can go to Know Your Meme if I want the primary-source take on internet memes. Same with a Wikipedia article on a location versus a Wikitravel article on a location: both useful, but I don't see why they have to be merged into one project (or why that would be helpful).

[pbhjpbhj]

Would you describe yourself as a hoarder? Applying your argument to personal belongings would appear to mean that unless it's actually completely unusable for anything it should be kept - even excrement is useful (very), as are old drinks cans (perhaps you could make a solar reflector), as are worn out clothes (make rags for cleaning), as are cellophane wrappings (could be heat welded and used as transparent insulation), ... sorry I'm digressing wildly.

Anyhow, the measure of inclusion on WP is not "isn't crap" but "is it notable" and whilst that gives a huge range to argue over it's is still clearly different to the question of "is it crap".

Take your sportsman - do you think that WP should be exhaustive? What is it about them that's notable and can be confirmed from other references?

[cabalamat]

> The fact is that Wikipedia is full of articles about people's own pet research projects which have no users and no impact.

I browse WP a fair bit. I've never come across any such articles.

Even if they do exist, what's the harm? People not interested in the topic won't read them, people who are interested will find them useful.