It never ceases to amaze how little Wikipedia understands Wikipedia. The purpose of Wikipedia to the end user (at least from my own personal experience and how I've seen other people use it) is to be able look up anything of any importance and get a quick overview of it.
Wikipedia will happily include every obscure city, animal and flower species on Earth (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnan...), but will try to delete articles on bloggers and singers that are very well known within their niche.
I don't get it. Adding additional pages to Wikipedia does very little to reduce its value and plenty to increase its value (always coming up first in Google to give a basic overview). No one is going to read or print the whole thing anyway. Whether it's 3.3 million or 13.3 million articles doesn't seem to make a difference.
Wikipedia will happily include every obscure city, animal and flower species on Earth (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnan...), but will try to delete articles on bloggers and singers that are very well known within their niche.
The standards for articles on bloggers and singers have to be high, because there's a huge number of bloggers and singers out there trying to promote themselves by writing on wikipedia about how awesome they are. Since nobody has the time or the inclination to police the article on Joe Blogg's Blog when it claims that "this is the awesomest blog on Earth", wikipedia tries to limit the number of articles on subjects where the article's editors are likely to have a strongly vested interest in the subject of the article.
Another reason: every obscure animal and flower species on Earth has been around for millions of years, and most of them will (I hope) be around in another million years. Towns usually have lives measured in centuries. The average blog will be forgotten (even by its author) in a few years.
The standards for articles on bloggers and singers have to be high
If they're not high quality, said famous people are likely to sue or otherwise cause hassle for Wikipedia. That's something a rare flower is not likely to do.
where some guy's article stated for years that he was a suspect in the Kennedy assassination. He never tried to sue wikipedia, though he did complain a lot.
Incidentally, though, this shows another reason why wikipedia articles on borderline-notable people are bad: the fewer people look at an article the more likely it is that crazy non-facts will persist in the article.
You clearly have never seen the OTRS queue if you think Seigenthaler is the closest to a suit. There have been over a handful of cases (against the WMF or Wikipedia editors themselves) and some even received media coverage, though Bauer [1] is the one that comes to mind at the moment but it certainly isn't the only one. [2]
It appears to amaze you that Wikipedia doesn't understand how you understand Wikipedia. There are many hundreds of thousands of words of discussion about the WP notability criteria, which you'll never bother to read, but which fairly convincingly refute the notion that WP is just making a casual mistake here.
There are many hundreds of thousands of words of discussion about the WP notability criteria, and at least half of them are about everything that's wrong about WP notability criteria. It's not a casual mistake in the slightest--it's a mistake, but it's not casual. It's a perniciously systemic mistake rooted in a dysfunctional culture more interested in process than product.
The difference is that it's easy to look primary source material for obscure cities, animals and flowers. But not for some random guy who blogs.
While I don't agree with some of the policies on the English Wikipedia, you also have to consider that having articles about anything incurs a long-term maintenance cost on the project. This especially true when the articles are about living persons or controversial subjects.
People are always complaining about Wikipedia because some obscure subject they personally care about didn't make the cut. Meanwhile there are literally millions of very useful encyclopedia articles on topics that unquestionably belong in an encyclopedia.
It's that sort of content that Wikipedia mainly caters to.
This is the problem. Wikipedia takes its lead from encyclopedias, but it's not an encyclopedia, because it's fundamentally different. It doesn't have the same space constraints, it isn't written in the same way, it isn't referenced in the same way, etc.
"Does this article feel like it belongs in an 18th century concept of an encyclopedia" kind of test for inclusion or deletion in Wikipedia just seems wrong-headed to me.
Wikipedia set out to be an encyclopaedia, not a collection of random facts. Complaining that wikipedia isn't a collection of random facts is like complaining that vi isn't Nethack. There's no reason why it couldn't be, but it isn't, and the people maintaining it don't want it to be, so that's that.
I've never understood why those who do want wikipedia to be wiki-random-non-notable-factia don't just start wiki-random-non-notable-factia. I predict it will be fairly unmaintainable, but I'm totally keen to be proven wrong.
The textual content and most of the image content is all licensed under licenses that allow you to download a copy and put it on your own server. I have a copy of English, Spanish, and Portuguese Wikipedias (text only!) in a pendrive on my desk. There's a conveniently downloadable textual tarball. Furthermore, you can even follow Recent Changes to keep things updated. And there are legit companies like Answers.com that actually do this.
I suggest that you start an "expanded Wikipedia" project with more inclusionist criteria. I'll be happy to contribute, although I'm pretty happy with the English Wikipedia's notability policy. I'm sure thousands of other people will be too, especially if the result is any good.
Jimmy Wales already did something like this, by the way.
It's not fundamentally different. Wikipedia is explicitly like traditional encyclopedias in that it's not a primary source, and that it only wants articles about things which can be reliable cited in multiple primary sources.
Articles about random Internet personalities or some garage band are thus inherently not in the scope of the project, until they become more notable.
There's no shortage of source material on lots of topics deemed "non-notable", especially when the people deeming those topics "non-notable" are people who know next to nothing about the subject itself, or are too bound by process and policy to think about doing the right thing for the project.
I've said this before, but if Wikipedia ever fails, it will be because of their tendency to delete articles that other people find relevant; a competitor that doesn't insult its users by deleting their articles capriciously (and that includes a decent search function) would actually have a chance at the throne.
It's not just the immediate impact of deletion either. I don't bother trying to add to Wikipedia anymore, because I know if I can't meet some ill-defined criteria of notability within about 5 minutes, the article will be gone. Wikipedia really does not seem to do very much to encourage involvement, especially when it comes to adding to the site.
I haven't really found that, and I've added hundreds of articles. I think one of my articles has ever been deleted (on an internet meme), and two or three others were nominated for deletion but consensus was to keep them. If you write an article in a neutral tone that sounds like an encyclopedia article, with good sources that you cite to back up the statements it makes, it'll rarely run into problems.
If you write articles purely in certain controversial areas, like recent internet memes, I can see running into a lot of problems. But the vast majority of areas don't really have any rampant deletion. I've written articles on mathematical formulas, on prominent computer scientists, on important physics books, on 18th-century politicians, on famous paintings, on well-known children's toys, and on varieties of cheese, among other things, and never gotten any problems with any of them.
I don't know what it's called, but many Wikipedia editors clearly have it. Here's a great example - apparently there are schools of thought amongst these guys, the most popular being "Deletionist". That's right: people who believe Wikipedia is too big and needs to be pared down. Makes zero sense.
It's a question of whether you want a well manicured arboretum or a wild forest filled with it's share of beautiful trees but also lots of brambles and poison oak. Wikipedia is a garden. If you want the forest, there is Google. Adding additional pages to Wikipedia might not increase its value. Someone has to maintain those new pages, keep them updated, and remove the dated and biased crap that can accumulate in Wikipedia's less visited corners.
Go ahead. You can't "delete" an article (you're not an admin), but if you want to see a speedy-close in action, nominate your home town for Articles for Deletion (AfD). Nobody's going to humor your argument about consistency between Yegge and an actual town; they'll just kill the AfD and get on with their lives.
Honestly, who is Steve Yegge? I've only heard of him because articles from his blog are occasionally posted here. His blog doesn't give any biographical details as far as I can tell, and I tried to look him up on wikipedia to see what he's actually done, but he doesn't have an article.
Can anyone explain why he's notable (apart from the old "I've heard of him therefore..." argument)? Not being combative, just curious.
As far as I can tell, he isn't notable outside of blogging (I had no idea who he was either). I can understand why his wikipedia page got deleted.
On the other hand, I have no problem with wikipedia including pages on famous bloggers who happen to be programmers. I think wikipedia's biggest strength is having something on just about everything. If I googled "Steve Yegge", it would be nice to have a wikipedia page there with a short blurb on why people know him (blogging about programming presumably).
Oddly, I was just thinking this morning about how people here on this site think Steve Yegge is extremely famous, while I don't really know who he is. His own description is that he was programmer at Amazon who wrote a blog in the evenings while drinking, and the blog became popular.
Not that I'm aware of. Anyway, my question (not directed to you, but to everyone) is why does everyone bring it up as this great point to his credit, when it was never released or used?
Hey I can't speak for anyone else, but Yegge made me a MUCH better programmer.
His article on "Java is the kingdom of nouns" and various writings explaining why lisp matters and the virtues and pitfalls of static typing/dynamic typing really made me question a lot of implicit assumptions I did not realize I had.
You have to understand that Wikipedia is what would happen if your liberal arts faculty committee meeting had a fling with StackOverflow: it is both a community with implicit status/karma, it has a (contentiously) consensus policy where academic papers and newspapers matter and the rest of the world is a bunch of pajama-wearing amateurs of minor significance, and it totally fetishizes adherence to the defined Wiki process.
If you really feel strongly that Yegge should be included, the effective way to do it is either get someone at the NYT to sneeze about him in print or hone your rules-lawyer skills, learn all their policies/acronyms, and outlast the other guys.
He was certainly famous at the time - MS Basic was good enough that they could charge for it to people who already had a free Basic with their hardware.
I think if you were to order topics by importance for inclusion in an encyclopedia, Degrassi: The Next Generation is much higher than Steve Yegge, though there's certainly an argument for including both. Certainly it's had more cultural impact on a much larger scale than Yegge. Encyclopedia coverage isn't a judgment of quality; it's not like the criteria for covering a novel or a film is the reviews they get from literary critics or film critics.
I think you hit what I believe with the phrase "cultural impact". Wikipedia doesn't deal well with a people/concepts/projects that have a technical impact on the lives of people. Look at how many video bloggers have pages then look at the technical people that influence the way we work.
Some of the problem is that Wikipedia's supposed to be a tertiary source, so it can only really follow what other people choose to cover. Technical people who have had good biographies written about them, or are mentioned in history books, or anything else similar, certainly get Wikipedia articles (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Physicists), and those who don't yet have Wikipedia articles should get them.
But if someone claims a particular technical person is important, yet they've never had a biography written about them, never even had a newspaper article written about them, never been mentioned even for a page or two in a history-of-technology book, and have basically gotten no writeups anywhere, Wikipedia shouldn't really be the first place they get a bio. The problem is really with the rest of the world: if indeed the person is important, why haven't any historians or journalists ever written about him/her? Once they do, Wikipedia can easily follow, citing those sources. As a tertiary source, Wikipedia's goal is to just summarize the existing literature, but if the existing literature itself is deficient, that's a problem that needs to be fixed elsewhere, in the primary and secondary sources. Someone in history, or in journalism, or in some similar field, needs to ask, "why aren't we writing about [x]?"
Some might just be patience. Pop culture is very time-sensitive, so is covered almost immediately-- books, journal articles, and newspaper articles appear within months or even days, which the Wikipedia article can cite. Important computer scientists do eventually get mentioned in biographies and history of technology books, but it sometimes takes years--- nobody is rushing to put out biographies right now covering "Important Computer Scientists of 2010" or anything.
Why does wikipedia even care if someone is notable or not? If someone went to the trouble to create a page about someone else, aren't they "notable" enough to have a page? This reeks of editorial bias.
I think it makes perfect sense. If one allows articles that have little interest, you'll pretty soon end up with a massive amount of articles that very few people are interested in reading, and even worse: articles that nobody is interested in maintaining.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and should as such have relatively high standards as opposed to the rest of the web.
Yeah, I think like many Wikipedia policies it's a useful pragmatic policy. How it's applied to specific cases is always worth looking at, but in principle, a ton of articles with no real interest or citeable sources lead to low-quality stuff. If a Coca-Cola PR person were to insert a bunch of advertising fluff in their article, people would notice almost immediately and fix it. But if your corner barber shop writes an article about themselves with a bunch of advertising fluff, without a notability policy it might stay there for a long time, because nobody cares enough or has any information they can use to improve the article. I mean what would it even mean to have a good article about your corner barber shop? Would you base it on personal observation, or do independent interviews with the owner or something? Unless it's gotten some degree of attention for something, and gotten written up somewhere, it seems like a good idea to just decide there's not enough there to write a Wikipedia article on it.
(There really are a bunch of really small businesses trying to insert ad blurbs into Wikipedia, so it's not a purely hypothetical problem. Minor academics pasting their CVs and bio blurbs into Wikipedia is another issue.)
But that is exactly the error - Wikipedia is no more an encyclopedia than nytimes.com is a newspaper. You cannot ship a 200 page newspaper or a 2000 volume encyclopedia, for entirely practical reasons having to do with physics.
It is therefore sensible to assume limit what you put into the encyclopedia, but since the same limit does not apply to the online edition of wikipedia, it does not make sense to apply it there.
They could automate this: if an article would not be read for a given amount of time by a given number of users, it could be automatically deleted. This would be much more objective than what they are doing now.
It's related to a critical mass of people believing someone or their works to be notable.
Agreed. Maybe we differ on what size makes a critical mass.
I'm not sure that the world has ever been as connected as it is right at this moment.
That's precisely what's making it so fragmented. People no longer need to join one giant popular culture, and are bonded with others all over the world in tiny interest groups. Anecdotally, I've never seen American Idol or America's Next Top <whatever>, and yet there is a notable population that worships those shows. For their part, they've never heard of _why or World of Warcraft or most anything else I'm interested in. I'm talking about cultural fragmentation, specifically.
I used to love editing Wikipedia to the point of obsession, but after going through a grueling process of defending an article from deletion I decided I had better things to do with my life. The subject of the article in question was the author of at least half a dozen highly influential books in his field, the subject of a biography published by a mainstream publisher, cited in publications by his peers probably hundreds if not thousands of times over the past thirty years, interviewed and quoted in mainstream media around the world etc etc etc. Unfortunately there was a clique of editors who didn't like his ideas. Essentially they thought he was a quack and therefore couldn't stand the idea that he'd be given exposure in Wikipedia. I have no opinion on whether he's a quack and it really has nothing whatsoever to do with his notability. Eventually I was able to establish that the guy is influential and the article is still there, but the stupidity of having to endlessly argue the point made me say to hell with it and I haven't edited anything since.
While individual Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes would seem to be only of borderline notability, any Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode in existence has been seen by many millions of people. Do a comparable number of people know about Steve Yegge?
Page says "Even though I'm quite aware of who he is as a programmer, he doesn't meet our standards for inclusion." I'm just curious about their standards for inclusion, any ideas?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people) I guess programmers are counted under "creative professionals". (There may be a meta-lesson here that there are specific notability guidelines for porn stars but not for programmers.)
The only reason there are specific notability guidelines for porn stars was because somebody was at some point writing thousands of articles about porn stars. I know this, because I used to press the "random article" button a lot.
My big problem with Wikipedia's notability guidelines is that they're too general. I don't accept that "notability" has to mean "known worldwide" or "known by a large number of people regardless of their domain." I believe that notability within a given domain (say, programming) should be enough. And I don't think there's much - if any - question that Steve is "notable" within programming circles.
Same with open-source projects... when the Wikipedia page for a F/OSS project is afd'd, the argument is always "it hasn't been covered in the NY Time" versus "but every geek knows about it, uses it, considers it notable, etc."
Ok, to be fair, there's some grey area here... make the domain small enough and everybodY is notable. (To themselves, for example). But I still think the WP policy needs adjusting... it's just not working for the way people expect and want to use Wikipedia.
Anyway, I just created a new Steve Yegge page with a number of links from reputable sources, including links from where he has presented at UIUC, Stanford and OSCON, an infoq.com article, and ajaxian.com article and an interview with Steve by the StackExchange guys. How anyone can contend that that isn't enough to establish notability is beyond me. You don't get invited to speak at Stanford, UIUC and to talk at OSCON if you're not "somebody."
And he's back. Right after I re-created the page, somebody tagged it - again - for "speedy delete" but the admin rejected the speedy delete request. Thankfully. With the citations and references I included, I hope that particular article will be safe from deletion now. But if anybody else feels like working on it a bit, have at it.
Wikipedia will happily include every obscure city, animal and flower species on Earth (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnan...), but will try to delete articles on bloggers and singers that are very well known within their niche.
I don't get it. Adding additional pages to Wikipedia does very little to reduce its value and plenty to increase its value (always coming up first in Google to give a basic overview). No one is going to read or print the whole thing anyway. Whether it's 3.3 million or 13.3 million articles doesn't seem to make a difference.