Call For Halt To Wikipedia Webcomic Deletions 720
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?"
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.
Troll? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just shift deleted items to another's sister site (Score:2, Interesting)
want to support can be quietly transferred to, so they can live out their lives there.
It's just plain silly to delete others' works.
Perhaps a network of WikiPeDeletions.org's - each specializing in a particular type of deleted item,
or possibly the reason for deletion (if known).
Of course, then, there'd then need to be a portal/search engine to find any article(s), on any/all
of the places where its topic may reside, after deletions by the original WikiPedia.org.
(This is meant as a serious article, despite its possibly humorouse spin-off URL names - above.)
Trivipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:3, Interesting)
Being an administrator on Wikipedia is a serious position of responsibility, yet 12 year olds are free to get themselves voted into the clique by ingratiating themselves with other admins and doing nothing but minor edits. If they actually knew the effort needed to research, source, verify and compose an article, perhaps they'd be less eager to delete it.
And when they run rampages on Wikipedia, abusing their position either to delete or force particular content into an article, they usually get away scot-free. If they're admonished, they're usually free to leave and come back under another name. Nobody knows who they really are. The people who do the same thing without becoming admins first are labeled "vandals" and indefinitely banned.
Given Wiki's lengthy treatment of Magneto... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:4, Interesting)
However, as you did ask, it's interesting that you note that removing info that people want to see if a bad thing. I would agree. But if the information is interesting, informative and on-topic, then it's not really trivia.
One thing I would like to point out is that list of information is frowned upon by many, many Wikipedians. Trivia sections are generally disliked because they a. are about trivia (i.e. information that is generally not important or germane to the topic) and Wikipedia is trying to be an encyclopedia, and b. we try to encourage excellent prose and brilliant writing in articles. List of unrelated information do not encourage that, and in fact can make an article less readable as they encourage sloppy and lazy editing. It's far easier to write a list of points than it is to carefully incorporate the information into prose. We don't want to encourage that sort of thing.
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.
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
This is the problem (Score:1, Interesting)
I figure 50 slashdotters could get toghether to change the page, and hence this assinine policy.
Re:So what makes your comic so special? (Score:3, Interesting)
If that one mp3 was on the top free mp3 charts, maybe it should be.
Why shouldnt all books that been in wikipedia, this is human knowledge we are talking about.
And I dont see why comics that have millions of readers online should be any different than the sunday comics. Or radios stations listings, thats a resource just like all the roads on maps, as famous road side diners.
I think your idea of notability is only for global, which doesnt work when there are groups of people and notability is smaller, small groups of scientists, famous alumni in local schools. A city might only have 1 famous historical site, why should it be banned because nobody has heard of the city? This is real world knowledge.
A happy medium between, must be on the cover of Forbes to having a webpage. The extreme approach is ruining wikipedia.
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think part of the problem is that to a casual wikipedia user, like most of those who have recently jumped on the webcomic deletion problem bandwagon (it's not like the phenomenon of these deletions has only just started), WP:AFD is a confusing place. It's tempting to think that people who comment there are in some way considered more important than you are. There's a lot of politicking going on behind the scenes that people might not be aware of (e.g. changes in notability guidelines), a lot of very technical discussion with frequent references to numerous policies, and it's easy to think that somebody weighing in with "*'''Delete''' does not meet [[WP:N]] due to lack of [[WP:RS]]; impossible to [[WP:V|verify]]. ~~~~" must be an administrator, just because they're clearly _so much more experienced_ than the casual user.
AFD is an intimidating forum, and I'm not sure what can be done about that. But I think we do need to do things to make it more welcoming for casual users.
Re:Trivipedia (Score:3, Interesting)
If Wikipedia wants to constantly delete, then shuffle the smaller articles to a Triviapedia. You might find some interesting statistics about what the people of the world (and not necessarily the Wiki) actually want to see.
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.
Re:So what makes your comic so special? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikiadmins are the epitome of ego. They are so egomaniacal they think they know better than the vain people who post on wikipedia. The love deleting. They love the power -- something they'd never EVER get to wield in real life.
Are there posts on wikipedia belonging to no name individuals or organizations -- yep, sure are. Many. Do they get taken down even-handedly? Oh good grief no. Who gets to decide who's famous or notable -- more admins? Today's cabal?
The one thing Wikiadmins really don't like is criticism. That's why I'd bet that they are all here, modding down every post that paints them in a bad light. The parent has been modded up and down like a YoYo.
Considering the regularity that admin-related scandals hit the pages of Slashdot alone, I'm continually astonished that anyone here defends Wikipedia, let alone donates money to it. It has been proven time, and time, and time again, that there are wikiadmins who are drunk on power and operating as part of cabals. There is corruption at the core of wikipedia -- proven. The term wikinazi is often used, and it is justifiable. There are wikiadmins who would joyfully burn books and are most surely pushing their own agenda. This goes high up in the organisation.
It's been asked before many times here -- but the wikinazis never answer. Who watches the watchers?
The only way forward for wikipedia is to remove all admins -- all of them. Even the best of them. They are self-appointed, self-important, self-aggrandizing egomaniacs -- that comes with wanting to be an admin. They are never to be trusted with the integrity of information. Never. EVER.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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?
Re:snobs (Score:3, Interesting)
Admins are to congratulate. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's an encyclopedia () -- meaning ``general education,,. The greek etymology has been incorrectly translated even here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia [wikipedia.org] as ``general knowledge,,.
It is not general knowledge, otherwise it would be called encyclognosis (""); for example, a POV is usually a very interesting piece of general knowledge but it should not be a part of an encyclopedia.
Wikipedia as it is, is a mess because it fails to enforce its role as the largest online encyclopedia and instead allows anyone to write non encyclopedic items in it. It should focus more on deleting such items (TV series, webcomics) than expanding its volume.
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not hard do be tempted into thinking like that when you read crap like
"user has ~20 (non-webcomic-related) edits. To new users and/or those user with very low edit count: your votes will never count as high (if at all) as those of more established editors. This is simply a precuation to prevent self-promotion. You are, of course, welcome to vote and comment." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Checkerboard_Nightmare [wikipedia.org]
folowed by an admin discounting half of the KEEP votes.
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.
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not sure what your issue is though. The article was kept! Perhaps it might be time to move on? This happened 2 years ago, and the article was kept, which is clearly what you wanted.
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:2, Interesting)
Trivia isn't always (Score:3, Interesting)
If progress had depended on Wikipedia, it wouldn't have happened. And it's not just in hard science - an art historian could provide countless examples of what became major movements in art that began far out in the margins. In censoring "trivia" is Wikipedia castrating humanity's future?
Citizendium has no "notability" policy (Score:4, Interesting)
We ( Citizendium [citizendium.org], Slashdotted yesterday [slashdot.org]) have no "notability" policy. Like much that is conceptually confused on Wikipedia, that policy was invented after I left.
Of relevance: we do have a maintainability policy [citizendium.org]. I'm not sure what our stance toward webcomics might be, but I suspect it would turn out to be more permissive than Wikipedia's. Just note that we do have a strict rule against self-promotion [citizendium.org]. This means that a webcomic would have to be at least important enough for someone else to want to start an article about it. Fair enough, no?
In other news, the Citizendium has just started its own funding drive [groundspring.org]. If you're boycotting Wikipedia over deletionism, but you want to support free knowledge, why not give to an outfit that really needs your money? :-)
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.
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:3, Interesting)
When the fan base got a response on discussion forums, it was "this isn't a vote". I understand that Wikipedia wants to guard against lone-rangers taking liberty with the articles and re-writing history, but this is ludicrous.
"The Free Encyclopedia That Anyone Can Edit". Editable by anyone, censored by a few, in what has essentially become a popularity contest.
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I've largely given up contributing... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bubble_Eye&oldid=133225614 [wikipedia.org]
This is what's there now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bubble_Eye [wikipedia.org]
Apparently my original article was gutted because it didn't include footnotes. Rather than taking the time to footnote the article (the information was all taken from references, and the references I used were cited at the bottom), someone saw fit just to gut the article, removing the majority of the useful information. Couldn't they have put a note at the top saying that the article needs to be footnoted?
I see this crap happening all the time, and not just on articles I've contributed to. But it's gotten to the point where I feel like if I go in and edit an article, the edit is just going to be reverted. Why bother?
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:Admins to blame? (Score:3, Interesting)
From the page of a guy [wikipedia.org] who is trying to delete a page I'm interested in:
What a son of a bitch. "I am", says he, "more qualified than you to judge what belongs." Doctorfluffy, kiss my ass, you self-appointed keeper of the One True Way. Your opinion counts for no more than mine or anyone else. I know it's easier to destroy than to create, but I can't imagine bragging about it any more than I'd brag about torturing puppies.
I gave up too... (Score:3, Interesting)
We wouldn't have minded cleaning it up, changing it, adding more references, doing whatever was required... but instead we were hustled off. We have thousands of preorders, thousands of visitors to our site every month, and coverage all around the world, all before even being released, all for an unfunded fan film made mostly with blood and sweat...but, apparently, we're not noteworthy enough.
I've had other, similar Wiki experiences, but this was enough for me to call it a day. I still use WP frequently, mostly for obscure stuff, but it seems the editors have an iron fist over the place. As such, I'll avoid subjecting myself to that.
Re:Admins to blame? (Score:2, Interesting)
Someone has gone power crazy, I'm glad this is being drawn attention to.
Funny you mention the Star Wars Kid and Wikipedia (Score:1, Interesting)