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Call For Halt To Wikipedia Webcomic Deletions
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Oct 31, 2007 04:16 AM
from the deletionism-rampant dept.
from the deletionism-rampant dept.
ObsessiveMathsFreak writes "Howard Tayler, the webcomic artist of Schlock Mercenary fame, is calling on people not to donate money during the latest Wikimedia Foundation fund-raiser. This is to protest the 'notability purges' taking place throughout Wikipedia, where articles are being removed en-masse by what many see as overzealous admins. The webcomic community in particular has long felt slighted by the application of Wikipedia's contentious Notability policy. Wikinews reporters have recently begun investigating this issue, but are the admins listening?"
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Admins to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that there are definitely some people who want to delete to readily, but then again there are people who are pushing trivia on Wikipedia, which is not good. It can run both ways.
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
If articles such as webcomics have been deleted due to speedy deletion, then the admin doing the deletion is in violation of policy and should be called to account. However, is there any evidence of that happening? I'm genuinely interested.
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as information is accurate, it shouldn't need to be important. Stick it in a trivia page or separate it if you want, but don't make it disappear. We all see different things as important - and on a global scale, any piece of information will be important to someone.
Of course, if it turns out that this whole thing is about Wikipedia's hard drives getting a bit cramped and you need to trim things down because a nonprofit can't afford a new drive, contact me and I'll FedEx down a spare drive
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the reason why Wikipedia is cool is because of the sometimes-bizarre breadth and depth of the information in there. Have you ever looked at some of the TV show pages? I won't name names, because I don't want some overzealous admin going in and burning them all, but there are some long-running shows that have pages for every one of hundreds of episodes, that get into incredible minutiea and detail. And I think that's great. That's what makes Wikipedia superior to any other 'encyclopedia' -- every other encyclopedia that's ever been written has been forced to cut and compress content due to the nature of paper-based printing. Wikipedia doesn't, but it sure seems like some people are still thinking that way.
If an article is well-written and the content in it is factual and referenced, I think it's ridiculous to delete it on "notability" grounds, particularly when the 'notability' criteria tend to be debatable and subjective.
Wikipedia is, despite all these things, a good project. But it's sometimes painful to watch because it could be so much more, if it wasn't held back by people quibbling over what "encyclopediac" means. If Wikipedia just kept going and didn't look back, it would redefine what an 'encyclopedia' meant. It could own that word, rather than be shackled by it.
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe some admins and users have taken the various "Wikipedia vs. Britanica" comparisons of years past a little too much to heart, and are trying to "improve" Wikipedia by removing all of those articles which wouldn't ever appear in Britanica, but that's an extremely short-sighted thing to do. I mean, "A page for every Pokemon" may be a catchy (if inaccurate) joke about Wikipedia, but it also represents a strength, not a weakness: After all, there are lots of places one can go on the internet to find information about, say, France, or The Battle of the Nile, or Channel Island Politics; there aren't nearly as many places you can go to learn actual facts about Patrick Farley's award-winning comics, or the differences between all of the various Gundam Wing incarnations, or the full internet career arc of Star Wars Kid.
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you have to be concerned about pushing the S/N ratio too low, but that could be remedied without constant purging based on subjective guidelines. If an article starts to accrue a lot of cruft or trivia, either just rewrite it more cleanly (preserving the other information, if anyone wants it, in the older versions), or move the trivia to a sub-page. There's no reason why you can't have a page for 'foo' and then a separate page for 'foo trivia' or 'foo in popular culture', if those sections are starting to get out of hand. That lets the people who want to find that information find it, while presenting a concise summary on the main namespace page.
More information is always better; the only bad information is unorganized information. If WP admins were as aggressive about shuffling non-essential stuff into sub-articles and keeping the main namespace clear, it would be fine, and Wikipedia would be broader and deeper as a result.
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly the administrator, JtkieferT, is deleting votes and using fairly arbitrary criteria to delete them.
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no irony in the above whatsoever. For Encarta or EB to have an article on "Bob the Angry Flower", Microsoft or Britannica has to pay professionals real money to research and write the article for the subject. And in the past, EB would have had the added problem of the size of the encyclopedia adding to its cost and manageability for end users. By comparison, in Wikipedia we're talking about articles that have already been written and contributed for free, that - if truly non-noteworthy - add fractions of a cent to the costs of running Wikipedia as an on-going operation. Bandwidth costs for an article nobody reads are non-existent, the only real cost is storage. How much does 10 kilobytes cost?
I'm not proposing (and didn't propose - I did the opposite) that there's no reason for AFDs at all, but I do believe that as deleting legitimate articles has a real cost and DOES undermine Wikipedia more than keeping a non-notable article, the discretion should be on the side of not deleting. Fast track processes for article deletion in particular need to be reviewed so only the narrowest of criteria can apply to them. That is not the case right now.
Personally I can't see how a periodically updated openly available webcomic is not a legitimate subject for an encyclopedia article in an environment such as Wikipedia's where the contribution cost is free and the maintenance cost is more or less proportional to the webcomic's notability. Unless the comic is being used as a wedge to pass by genuinely unencyclopedic content, there's no legitimate reason to delete such articles.
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not like we're talking about a set of books here, where there are limits to how big the set could reasonably be? Is Wikipedia running out of hard drive space?
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Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem comes in when someone nominates for speedy deletion an article on a website which has clearly been regularly updated for years and has an active fanbase. Not only is this a request for cleanup but it is also a slap in the face as you're put in the same category as the Eponymous Bastard Webcomic Online. (unfortunately I don't have the list of deleted webcomic and the site is
I'd suggest that any web site that has been online and regularly updated for a year cannot be speedily deleted.
Another suggestion is to, instead of deleting, move them to a webcomic wiki.
But in the end, wikipedia has articles on every single pokemon. I'd consider webcomics more interesting than that.
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Interesting)
And yes, there are problems with administrators. They are neither sysadmins, nor moderators, but mop-wielders; the problem is that many of them forget that their place on Wikipedia is that of the janitor. It's not a position of nobility and honor, but a behind-the-scenes set of tasks that should never be brazenly abused.
Finally, the community does not have a system in place for culling definitive consensus. The system currently in place is essentially plurality voting: A small slice of the population shows up, registers to vote, and then votes for one of the two candidates (Mr. "Keep" or Mr. "Delete.") Occasionally, there are write-ins, but those are usually viewed as part of the spoiler effect. The administrator presiding over the vote may choose to, at his discretion, nullify or amend the results of the vote. It's democratic, but not quite consensual.
Parent
Re:Problem parsing sentence (Score:5, Interesting)
A corollary to Duverger's Law, which predicts that plurality voting will always lead to two-party systems, the spoiler effect is the tendency of a third-party candidate (like Ms. "Cleanup" or Mr. "Merge") to "steal votes" from another, similarly aligned candidate, like Mr. "Keep."
My comment was that advanced members of the community with a broader mindset than "Keep/delete," such as myself back when I was on Wikipedia, tended to aim towards merging or cleanup whenever possible for notable articles, but there is almost never any such splintering within the "delete" crowd, and they tend to be quite vocal in eliminating claims of notability. For example, in this case, I remember a few months back how the Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards, possibly the highest honor a webcomic artist can receive, was not only refused as a measure of notability, but also had its article deleted. This is a more serious example, but there are others.
I need sleep now, but I'll just leave with my story. I left the project because of what I perceived as administrative abuse of a fellow user who was always acting in good faith until she was blocked, after which her actions were made in the same bad faith as those of the administrators with whom she sparred. It's really too bad; I wanted to do a series of articles on Internet memes, but I left and ED stepped in instead. (Believe me, ED is no improvement.) You can find the story at my userpage. People like me will never rejoin the project as long as it refuses a simple truth: It's not possible for Wikipedia to be open and controlled at the same time. The same thing happened to cdrecord, XFree86, and Mozilla with Debian; they thought they could control something that belongs to the community, and each time, Debian just shrugged and forked. The only things standing between Wikipedia and that fate are deep pockets and name recognition.
Parent
Re:Feel proud of yourself then? (Score:5, Funny)
Kinda like yelling at someone over the internet.
Arrogant prat.
Oh, the irony is delicious!
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is trivia bad?
Seriously. What's wrong with more articles? Why would wikipedia ever reject a voluntary contribution?
Extra articles don't clutter up wikipedia. They simply don't get looked at. So what? Who cares? Let them sit there. If someone wants to improve them, let them. If no one looks at them, then they aren't harming anyone. The elitism that's taken hold in wikipedia is an antithetical to the very principles on which it was founded.
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
But aren't 99% of the entries in any encyclopedia unimportant to a particular reader of that encyclopedia? Conversely, if someone bothered to make a Wikipedia entry for it, there is at least one person in the world who considered this information important. In your defense you only give a circular definition of unimportant (= trivial = unimportant).
That sounds like shifting the goal posts to me. Yes, the entry of a particular topic should be on topic, but as long as an entry is on topic to a particular subject, even if the topic is the color of the bricks of the local school, why should it be deleted? Or do you mean that Wikipedia as a whole has a subject? If so, what is it?
Again, why, and what exactly is `trivial'?
(Ignoring the rather cryptic example.) Of course there are reasons to remove information, but why is `it is trivial' one of these reasons?
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I see it, Wikipedia is less an encyclopaedia and more a burgeoning store of all world knowledge. Obviously there has to be a lower limit to the notability or notoriety of a subject before you want to waste the few kb's of storage space on it (a One Childish n00b entry, for example, would be pointless, but an article on the debate over whether trivia sections should or shouldn't be allowed would be worthy of a mention on Wikipedia's Wikipedia page - Ironically, probably in the trivia section), but as far as I see it, eliminating trivia sections is destroying large swathes of interesting facts because it doesn't fit an encyclopaedic style.
The problem that arises from that is you are removing knowledge that people might want to read. Wikipedia is not a valid academic reference and I doubt it ever will be due to the fluid nature of it's contents, so removing interesting trivia tidbits to make articles look more academic or 'encyclopaedia-like' strikes me as taking form over function.
Parent
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
One flaw with that...
Wiki has evolved into a useful resource for looking up information - Not always the authoritative source, but if I don't recognize a concept, I'll usually check Wiki first.
Now, in the long run, every article should evolve into something well-written and fully referenced. In the short term, even a two-sentence summary of something only briefly popular does a world more good than nothing. Yeah, what amounts to a promotional blurb for a minor webcomic doesn't exactly qualify as high-quality reference material - But as opposed to a blank page?
In the loooooooong term, humanity itself fails the "notability" requirement. Unless Wiki evolves into a math and physics oriented reference, calling "WWII" notable and "Full Frontal Nerdity" not, amounts to nothing less than purely subjective discrimination.
Parent
On the other hand... (Score:5, Insightful)
If there is one side you should not listen to on if web comic X should be put there, it is the web comic writers. Because these are already biased.
Re:On the other hand... (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I write a webcomic. I admit it. I also know that as it stands, I have a snowball's chance in hell of getting a Wikipedia article, and probably will remain at that point for another year, minimum. I don't care about getting an article for my comic there right now because either way I don't stand to profit in any form beyond some eventual respect for what I do, so my impact is reduced to whatever stir I can make.
I don't want the guidelines removed; I want something a little less capricious than "Must have been reviewed in dead-tree format". If truly notable comics like Evil Inc. and Checkerboard Nightmare are deleted from Wikipedia, and Schlock Mercenary's status on wikipedia is somehow 'tainted' because his series of books is self-published as opposed to going through some publisher like Scholastic, then how the hell am I supposed to know when mine is notable? More importantly, WHEN? Does a review in my college's paper count? The AJC? Does every webcomic have to be featured in the New York Times to be notable? Or can I just go "I have X number of comics in my archive and X amount of fanbase, is this enough?"
The concept that all online content is suspect is a holdover from Compuserve days. Surely we have evolved beyond this.
Parent
snobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Trivipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
notability purges on mens rights issues (Score:5, Interesting)
It's sad that even famous authors and events in history are removed due to notability, if simpsons episodes and 4chan can be in it, so can best selling authors from the 80s. I Tried to add Twyana Davis as an article, just for it be deleted for notability reasons, mostly because a couple 20'ish editors never alive in the 80s, read the newspapers or watched tv. So its not notable to them. One of the largest rape scandals to happen.
I've seen editors say text was copyrighted, when it was released under creative commons, and proof provided, still deleted. An editor deletes because stub articles should be put into other articles, which makes no sense. Information goes in, it gets edited by everyone as time goes on, thats what makes a wiki powerful.
Its a freaking political nightmare, if someone doesn't agree with you, they can delete it for a numerous reasons, and people are finally seeing that. Notability is sighted as the number 1 excuse for deleting an article that someone doesnt agree with.
Ha, take a look at the pit bull article, its a warzone, editors dont agree with the AKA and the National society of veterinarians.
Wikipedia while useful, is horribly ingrained in thought control by editors. Its suppose to be a collection of human knowledge, not "Only knowledge that we agree with". Those who control the information, as the saying goes....
So, I wont donate until they change their rules and behavior. Groups have set up their own WIKI's due to this political/social moderation.
Bah! It's an encyclopedia, stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason it's called Wikipedia and that is to be a tertiary source like any other encyclopedia. There is nothing new or unique about how encyclopedias work, and since notability is a subset of reliable sourcing, why doesn't this point get hammered into the minds of the general public when Wikipedia is one of the most used online resources?
Admittedly, Wiki itself doesn't make the distinction, and it's further hampered by Jimbo Wales going out and making asinine statements about how Wikipedia aims to be "the sum of all human knowledge" [wikipedia.org]. But some of the fault has to lie with the public. I suppose a lot of (mostly younger) people have never owned an old-fashioned encyclopedia in their life, and are used to more casual websites where anything goes.
Re:Bah! It's an encyclopedia, stupid! (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two issues. The first is that a lot of fancruft and garage band stuff is inappropriately entered. Zapping stuff like that kinda numbs the admins to deletion, it becomes a routine thing to do.
Along comes someone wanting to create an entry on Wikipedia about a comic, but they haven't a clue how to cite references - or where the media has failed - actually know that you should source everything in an encyclopedia.
So, you now have a rather crufty "Comic X" article, which comes to the attention of this deletion-numb admin. Knows nothing about the subject, plugs it into Google, gets a few hits but not a lot. It gets tagged for deletion, when perhaps it should have been tagged as lacking sources. This last option is a step away from deletion and a far better solution.
Oh, and *please* do donate. Wikipedia is the 9th most visited site on the Internet, and the Wikimedia Commons is growing at a rate of 5,000 images a day.
Parent
Re:Bah! It's an encyclopedia, stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
wikisnobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Just the other day I saw that "People Eating Tasty Animals" was marked for deletion twice. While it's not as notable as "roe vs wade", IMO it was an important case (whether or not you liked the verdict).
Also, there are plenty of articles which are not written in an "encyclopedic way", but those are the bits I like.
for example: "Deed of change of name" (which was recently brought to my attention)
Edited snippet:
"There are various reasons why a person would want to change his or her name:
* to replace a frivolous name given by their parents (e.g., old name James Bond, new name Jason Bond; a well known example is Elton John, who changed from Reginald Kenneth Dwight in favour of a career in the Music Industry)"
The last bit is definitely not "encyclopedic in style", but I like it
The way wikipedia currently works, I think only spam or vandalism articles should be deleted. Because with deletion you lose a LOT of stuff permanently. There is no history etc. They could always leave the page and history there, then replace the final page with a standard "deleted/not notable/<other reason>" and people can go to history to see the article if they want.
If it's a namespace/clutter issue, why don't they just move all the stuff they consider not notable in a "not notable" section.
e.g.
Anyway, I don't really care if wikipedia destroys their own usefulness - IMO the wikipedia has become successful in spite of the policies, power-mad admins and "leadership" than because of it. It's a wiki, lots of people used it and it grew. If wikipedia doesn't want to hold "nonnotable" stuff I'm sure someone eventually would and a decent search engine should help me find it.
Deleting is too easy (Score:5, Insightful)
I gave up offering help to Wikipedia last year... (Score:5, Insightful)
When questioned one of the deletee's simply replied "well it was marked for deletion and no-one said anything so we deleted it".
So when you spend your own free time to help out and have some idiots just click away on the delete button it really makes you think "why bother" and since then, I havent.
Webcomics vs. Porn Stars (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that any actor, even an actor in a cheap porn filmed in a barn in Idaho, is worthy of an article because it exists in the space outside of Internet culture while a webcomic has to meet a meaningless standard of notability outside of its primary sphere of influence and existence is evidence that the notability requirement, while well-meaning, is fundamentally flawed.
Storm on the horizon? (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot tends to draw attention to things in a massive way, and that Delete button is pretty high-profile right now.
I'm not saying people should do it, but if they did... Would it cause a policy change? A LOT of useful articles will disappear if it happens.
Personally, I think Wikipedia is only good for the non-obvious stuff... You know, the stuff you -can't- find in a 'real' encyclopedia. Anything I could find in a real one, I'd go there first, since I'd likely want to cite it.
I've largely given up contributing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Fuck you, tossers - I'll save my creative time and effort for someone who can appreciate it.
Everyone is interested in something different (Score:5, Interesting)
I watched 28 Days Later [wikipedia.org] a few days ago and then read its article on Wikipedia. I was intrigued by the virus in the movie [wikipedia.org] and noticed that its article needed a little cleaning up, so I did so [wikipedia.org]. Oh well. They decided that it's just fanfiction [wikipedia.org] and now it's marked for deletion.
OK, so it's just an unimportant article about a fictional virus [wikipedia.org], but darn it, I found it interesting reading to the point that I wanted to add to it. I'm a Republican [wikipedia.org] and not interested in the Democratic candidates next year; maybe I should delete their article. Baseball [wikipedia.org] is just a game; delete. I'm not Catholic [wikipedia.org] - gotta go. I like turtles all the way down [wikipedia.org], so dark matter [wikipedia.org] can bite it.
My point is that everyone values and takes interest in different things. If it's not costing Wikipedia a lot to host minor pages on diverse subjects, then why not? Part of that huge diversity is what made Wikipedia popular. You'd think they'd heard of the network effect [wikipedia.org] and the long tail [wikipedia.org].
At any rate, they can delete the article I like if they want, but if they're still going to ask for my money [wikimediafoundation.org] afterward, they can bite me [wikipedia.org]. Incidentally, that last article is the plot summary of an episode of a non-mainstream TV show. Hope I didn't draw the attention of the delete-happy admins.
Problems With 'Notability' at Wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
The Wikiproject for Webcomics (Score:5, Interesting)
Like other Wikiprojects, we worked together to establish a consistent framework of notability requirements for webcomics; we culled out freshly-minted vanity cruft; we welcomed and nurtured new articles; we maintained lists of deserving webcomics which did not yet have articles; the works. Most importantly, we had a process, carefully arrived at through discussion and consensus (involving some of the premier names in webcomics study and criticism, I might add), under which everyone could operate reasonably.
It worked.
I myself ran some entries through the AfD (VfD then, but still) process because they didn't fit (one that I recall was a webcomic with four pages, two of which were single-image "splash" pages); on those occasions, I took the trouble to carefully explain the community criteria involved, and encourage the overly enthusiastic contributors to keep working on their comic, and to stick around and contribute more to Wikipedia in the meantime.
For comics which did fit the inclusion criteria, I would go to the comic's forum, where inevitably someone would have just posted a "Hey, I just created an article about [xxxx] on Wikipedia!" message, and I would welcome them to Wikipedia, explain the process involved and why their webcomic was suitable for inclusion, explain how to get started editing, and how to avoid the standard eager-puppy newbie editing mistakes.
Like I said, we had a mutually-agreed upon framework in place; while not perfect, it succeeded in keeping WP free of vanity cruft, and, at the same time, kept contentious disagreements to a minimum.
And then I took a little vacation.
At the same time, a couple of the other major contributors took a break; as a result, there weren't enough people minding the store when two people, who had no real knowledge of webcomics, swept in and started tossing articles to the VfD buzz saw, right and left. Never mind the established process; never mind the carefully-negotiated group consensus -- they simply swept in, substituted their notions of notability for those of dozens of previous contributors to Wikipedia, and eviscerated the webcomics field.
After which, of course, most of the people who cared about webcomics simply gave up on Wikipedia. Some of their efforts moved over to the GFDL Comixpedia, but its user base, obviously, lacks the scale of Wikipedia's. Mostly, the folks who had devoted so many hours to webcomics articles simply found themselves deflated by the whole experience. In my case, it more or less chased me away from Wikipedia for a couple of years; and even now, I'm very careful about which articles I work on; I only have just so much time and attention I can spend, and I cannot afford to play guardian angel to every article I work on, to make sure that someone doesn't just delete it.
Since the dawn of the Great Webcomics Purge, Wikipedia's history with webcomics articles has been one long string of increasingly absurd "Oh my Gawd -- can you believe they {deleted, tried to delete} that?" moments. Time and again, articles have been proposed for deletion which would normally have served knowledgeable webcomics experts as reductio ad absurdam examples of articles which could never possibly be proposed for deletion.
Re:So what makes your comic so special? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Troll? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Troll? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Troll? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Wow. Cry baby much?" - A trollish start, obviously. Then the comment writer misses the point of the article by going on to list things *he* considers non-notable.
"What's important to someone, a fan, a listener, a developer may not be important to anyone else and you have to work hard to prove notability." - His use of this sentence is a logical contradiction; the sentence shows how subjective 'notable' is.
"Mere existence isn't enough. Has the comic you read won an award? Published an anthology? Those are pretty good indicators of notability. Having a URL? No." - He is putting up a straw man here.
"The whine that some comic was mentioned in a local newspaper was laughable; being notable in your own back yard, how is that good notability?" - Another straw man and wait, I thought he only said a URL wasn't notable? Have to be published in a "popular" paper? SUBJECTIVE.
"Heck, if that counted I think I'll present a note from my mom saying I'm notable and list myself. Why should web comics have different rules to everyone else?" - Two straw men; note from mom is an uninsightful analogy, and the article wasn't about web comics 'having different rules'.
That's why it's a troll. To respond to you rather than this troll - I see that you are defending Wikipedia in this thread, presumably because you've invested some time in it, but please keep in mind that the best way to help something is not necessarily to defend its current practices, if they are flawed.
Parent
Re:So what makes your comic so special? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, the problem is, what defines notability? I believe an example I saw given on Wikipedia was "will they still matter in 50 years?". Well, in today's culture, how many people are still "notable" from the 1950s that still were of some importance in the time, anyway? It would be a little bit like suggesting that a library (or especially the Library of Congress) only archive "best sellers".
And of course, there should be no problem with an article on Wikipedia discussing web comics which then lists dozens or even hundreds of web comic serials. But for every single pokey-the-fucking-penguin to have its own article? I don't really see the point.
So there needs to be a careful balance between only documenting and archiving things that "matter a great deal" and letting a lot of history and information slough off to the side forever, because at the time, not enough people deemed the subject or topic "popular" enough.
Parent
Re:So what makes your comic so special? (Score:5, Insightful)
I use Wikipedia to answer this simple question: who/what the fuck is x? If people start deleting articles just because they think x isn't important enough, how am I supposed to find out what x is, even if nobody really cares about x?
As long as people don't write their own articles and there's no original research, I don't care whether the article is deserved or not. It's not like those articles take up a lot of room, or that it makes it harder to browse wikipedia...
Parent
Re:So what makes your comic so special? (Score:5, Insightful)
You summed up my feelings on the subject pretty well. If I head to Wikipedia to find information on something, perhaps from an article I know existed a few weeks ago and it's not there then clearly whatever I was looking for should've been there. But certain Wikipedia editors seem to think that only the biggest most important things are worthy of attention, if anything it should be the other way around.
My point is that unlike a regular encyclopedia Wikipedia has the ability to not just contain articles about "important" things (as deemed by the editors) but also about things which a normal encyclopedia would not bother including because it wouldn't fit. So to delete articles just because some random editor decided that the subject of the article wasn't notable enough is just silly and personally I think part of it is that certain people who edit Wikipedia are on a bit of a power trip and enjoy enforcing their own interpretation of the rules.
OTOH, I'm one of those guys who used to sit around and read dictionaries for fun when I was a kid, so I loe having lots and lots of articles to read, especially with hyperlinks, I never know what I'm going to learn when browsing Wikipedia.
/Mikael
Parent
Re:So what makes your comic so special? (Score:5, Insightful)
As Wikipedia tries to broaden its audience, the notability of much of its content, which is again almost by definition a reflection of interest, drops. Using that as a metric pretty much ensures a very bland collection of content which appeals only to the average schmoe, except that there's nobody to blame if the information is flat out wrong.
Why on earth at that point, after all the information that nobody else carries has been dropped from Wikipedia, would I want to use Wikipedia, when I can use Britannica, where I can have it all locally and not worry that someone's been screwing around with the article?
That's frankly the most stupid thing about this whole process - instead of demoting content from Wikipedia Prime to Wikipedia Everything, they're just throwing content out - articles in some cases where a lot of people devoted a lot of time to contribute and edit and crosslink with other articles. At some point, you're going to unravel a whole bunch of articles after whitewashing the more basic bits that they're built atop of.
Parent
Why does notability even matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, who cares? I don't. What if I want to know some details on [whatever web comic] someone just mentioned to me? Maybe I want to know a handful of relevant links? Google is going to give me a bunch of irrelevant crap I don't want.
On Wikipedia I can enter a word, name, phrase, and I'll get some information and some relevant links. I don't care for a damn second how "notable" the item in question is. I just want to know some information on what I typed in. Why is it such a huge deal if it's not that notable? Is there some huge scarcity of storage space for this data? I can see no reasonable excuse for having such strict and overzealous "notability" requirements.
I pretty often look up local bands to see some info about them. Of course none of them are even there. It would be nice if I didn't have to sort through a bunch of shitty, image/video-loaded Myspace pages in order to check out the local music scene. I'd love to read a few little blurbs about local bands on Wikipedia. Why is that such a problem? Actually, the real question is, is that even a problem at all?
IN FACT, I'll argue right now that the LESS notable something is, all the more reason to keep the article and get people to contribute whatever info they might have! Why even BOTHER running an online encyclopedia-style site if you're going to shut down articles that happen to pertain to not-widely-known subjects? I can understand extremely trivial stuff like "The QX935 is a $0.39 alarm clock from Bill's Dollar Store in Urbana, Ohio", but even then, maybe someone found an old "QX935" sitting around and are wondering about its origin?
I guess it's all a question of what the intention of Wikipedia is. They do have the text "edit an article and help make Wikipedia the best information source on the Internet", which implies to me that the more information available, the better. The whole "notability" rule seems to contradict this core concept, though.
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Re:Given Wiki's lengthy treatment of Magneto... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem, you see, is that Wikipedia has positioned itself as _not making judgements of importance of a particular subject_. Yet they use a word, "notability", that is a synonym of "importance".
Whether a wikipedia article is allowed to exist is supposed to be judged by a somewhat objective standard: whether or not other writers of reference works considered reliable have considered the subject important enough to write and publish about.
Unfortunately, the result of this rule is (1) subjective squabbling over which works are considered reliable and (2) a distinct bias against topics that are on the fringes of culture. Webcomics have suffered due to both of these: works that write about webcomics have largely been considered to be unreliable, and because they are often fringe subjects there aren't many works to choose from.
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