Ian Lamont notes an Industry Standard feature on Deletionpedia — a collection of 63,559 deleted Wikipedia pages that range from "vanity entries" or obscure points of reference to heavily edited topics that Wikipedia editors eventually deemed fan fiction, inadequately sourced, or otherwise lacking. Looking through the collection of removed articles, it's apparent that entertaining minutiae are often the target of Wikipedia editors: "Geek lore seems to be a particular target for deletion, with the deleted page of the month a comprehensive guide to 'Weapons of the Imperium (Warhammer 40,000)'. Deletionpedia provides links back to the Wikipedia deletion discussions, which are a lesson in magnification of minutiae; the Warhammer page was removed due to philosophical disagreements over what can be considered credible source material, while a page listing every chalkboard gag in The Simpsons opening credits spent 691 days on the site before being deleted as 'fancruft.'" Note that while Deletionpedia uses MediaWiki, it doesn't have wiki functionality — readers can't alter or update archived entries.
Yup, it's slashdotted. I think this is a fantastic idea, though. As someone who has added a few pages to Wikipedia over the years, and who's had to try to get some page deletions overturned, I can tell you it's a huge pain when some overzealous admin comes along and speedy deletes a page that multiple people have worked on, and has been online for over a year. Wikipedia needs a better deletion review policy. Maybe this site will help illustrate that.
No, just that many "Wikipedia Admins" (as opposed to active editors who don't seek special status) are sewer rejects who flock to Wikipedia because it lets them abuse power. Deletionists especially are a fucking retarded subclass of the rest, whose sole contribution to society is deleting something someone else did.
Wikipedia rocks. It's too bad so many people are dedicated to pissing all over it.
Wikipedia rocks. It's too bad so many people are dedicated to pissing all over it.
The concept rocks.
The actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired. The simple fact that Deletionism has been a hot subject for debate for at least two years (probably longer) and they still haven't implemented a solution, where it took other wikis (say, Citizendium) about three months to do so, is testament to that.
I stand by my journal entry. As long as any random fucktard can come over and get my article, and thus possibly hours of work, deleted for no good reason, I see no reason to contribute those hours.
I stand by my journal entry. As long as any random fucktard can come over and get my article, and thus possibly hours of work, deleted for no good reason, I see no reason to contribute those hours.
I am inclined to agree. I'd rather have too much stuff and the problem of organizing it than too little. I find Wikipedia's standard of relevance occasionally capricious and arbitrary.
I'd rather that data that has a narrow and specific audience get factored into subarticles rather than deleted. After all, someone worked to bring the data into a presentable format. Deletion serves nobody except the lazy and uninterested. A "see also" type link which points to the true esoteric information would serve the hard-core.
There's not even a compelling bandwidth argument. The notion of whether something is encyclopedic might make sense when drawing a cut line for a print edition, but sending an elaborate 404 page isn't much different than sending a narrow-interest article in terms of bandwidth.
I guess what I am getting at is that filtering for quality is often more likely to be objective than subjective, filtering for relevance is sometimes a bit subjective, and filtering for appeal is much more so. High quality contributions are valuable, regardless of the broadness of their appeal. There are media for which it makes sense to draw a cut line, but a search driven electronic format isn't so constrained.
I don't see what Wikipedia loses by keeping around narrow-interest articles as long as they're factual and neutral. If I happen to catalog all of the chalkboard gags, that takes nothing away from anything else. Sure, it won't be a featured article of the day. So what?
Wikipedia does lose when there's a large number of truly worthless or misleading articles. Those should get the axe. But those are worthless or misleading because their data is absent or inaccurate. I imagine sheer peer recognition of their crumminess would force them out of commission.
There's not even a compelling bandwidth argument. The notion of whether something is encyclopedic might make sense when drawing a cut line for a print edition, but sending an elaborate 404 page isn't much different than sending a narrow-interest article in terms of bandwidth.
Granted, the supporting media isn't a limiting factor on on-line encyclopaedia like it is on dead-tree version. *but* there is still a limiting resource : netizens with enough interests to maintain the article.
I don't see what Wikipedia loses by keeping around narrow-interest articles as long as they're factual and neutral. If I happen to catalog all of the chalkboard gags, that takes nothing away from anything else. {...} Wikipedia does lose when there's a large number of truly worthless or misleading articles. Those should get the axe. But those are worthless or misleading because their data is absent or inaccurate.
Well, that's exactly where there's a conflict. If you're the only single person interested in writing a list of chalkboard gags for wikipedia, chance are there won't be anyone else to maintain it and make sure it stay accurate and correct.
When a subjet is *definitely* too narrow, it's best to only leave in wikipedia itself a short summary (as a standalone article or a section in the Simpson's article) explain *what* these gags are, and then reference this list through a link pointing a separate wiki which is specialised in Simpson (I'm not sure but there's bound to be one somewhere).
That's already the case for lots of other stuff, StarWars universe is only described superficially in wikipedia and everything more detailed goes in Wookipedia. Star Trek doesn't need a full standalone page for every single minor caracter ever mentioned in the show : those usually are better living on Memory Alpha. Even "House M.D." episode are shortly summarized with links to external blog which go into deep exhaustive details criticizing the medical accuracy for absolutely every detail.
Writing an article that mostly nobody does give a damn about doesn't stop at the writing. There's a lot of subsequent maintenance that needs to be done : fixing vandalism, removing spam, keeping it up-to-dat, correcting mistake, etc. If a subject isn't popular enough, the article is going to rot. There are already thousand of ultra specialised wikis out-there maintained by hard-core fans that are suffisently dedicated and no-lifers to attend correctly to such article as those articles deserve.
That's also why Deletionpedia plays a capital role : as a temporary graveyard where to store such kind of too much specialised lists, which are too much details and not enough interest for wikipedia. But don't have yet an actively maintained copy somewhere on some hardcore-fan wiki.
While you raise some interessting points on maintenance it's clear that they deflect from the actual discussion about cruft and could be easily addressed by technical measures. For listings it would be easy to require that a "valid until XX.XX.XXXX" notice be added and it would also be easy to automatically tag a page that hasn't been maintained for a while so readers know what value the information has. Bottomline remains that deletion is much too harsh especially since some of us where hoping that wikiped
Do you have an example of an article of yours that was unfairly deleted?
Two or three, yes. Unfortunately, a delete also means the destruction of the edit history and talk page, otherwise I'd link to them and you could check for yourself whether or not you agree.,-)
An encyclopedia is especially where being notable is important,
Says who? Merriam Webster says:
Main Entry:
encyclopedia Listen to the pronunciation of encyclopedia Pronunciation:
\in-s-kl-p-d-\ Function:
noun Etymology:
Medieval Latin encyclopaedia course of general educati
I used to love Wikipedia, but it has been guided into a ditch. They are have a very distinct world view and anything not fitting into that gets removed completely or edited out. There are certain subjects you cannot keep to their own page if on the site at all even with real sources simply because it does not fit their view of what is right.
I use Wikipedia to find only stuff I don't lose value with if its wrong Like episode names from tv series When movies came out songs by artist people who passed away nearl
Why is it so horrible to have that stuff there? Seriously,I want to know. The Wikipedia entries(at least for me) is always gotten to by either Google or the search on the home page,so I wouldn't even know they HAD a "every weapon in Warhammer" page if I didn't specifically go looking for it. Now for stuff that is bold faced lies or spin,yeah I can see deleting it. The last thing we need is another source of spin.
But just because some think the knowledge is stupid doesn't mean it should be tossed. If for
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@deletionpedia.dbatley.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
a collection of 63,559 deleted Wikipedia pages that range from "vanity entries" or obscure points of reference to heavily edited topics that Wikipedia administrators eventually deemed fan fiction
There, fixed that for you.
I honestly don't get the whole hate that Wikipedia seems to have against sci-fi and geeky topics... I think it's an attack by people who figure that if they have too much of it that Wikipedia won't resemble an old media encylopedia. This argument is pretty stupid, given the nigh-unlimited space in their database (Wikipedia themselves have said not to worry about performance [wikipedia.org]).
Somoene's going to come in here and say that the problem isn't the topic, it's that the articles are either original research, aren't verifiable, or aren't "notable" (the latter is the worst argument I've heard), but IMNSHO there is a definite bias, especially among admins, against these types of articles.
So here's a question. Other than attacks, racism, unverifiable information and such (which are already banned under other Wikipedia guidelines), what real effect would it have on the encyclopedia other than another record in the database that nobody other than the author would ever access?
Remember, anyone could take an irrelevant link to the article out of other, more accessed articles where it doesn't belong, so the chances of someone seeing it would be next to nil with the exception of the Random Page button (which itself could weight pages by the number of accesses they've had already, or possibly number of incoming links a page has, in order to make the chances of finding such useless pages next to nil as well).
Besides, something as personal as a "daily morning routine" would be a perfect candidate to be moved to userspace... they could leave a redirect if you like.
In my experience at Slashdot (and I have quite a bit, if you look at my user summary... I think I started in 2001 or 2002), if you present an argument against the general consensus in a way that is thought-out, well-spoken, and most importantly not insulting, you'll get modded up.
Here, though, I think you're missing the point, and that is that I posted in several threads, if not my initial comment (I was the OP), that a) there is a bias in what administrators will vote to delete even if they find other pol
This article, despite its massive breadth and deep emotional investment, did not contain one single citation to a reliable source that was independent of the subject.
Dismissing all primary sources as unreliable a priori would be silly, if it weren't so intellectually bankrupt.
This article, despite its massive breadth and deep emotional investment, did not contain one single citation to a reliable source that was independent of the subject. That is why it was deleted.
Which in this case is ridiculuous, Games Workshop created the Warhammer universe and retain creative control over it. It is thus impossible for an authoritative source listing the 'Weapons of the Imperium' to exist independently of GW; in fact, it is precisely the 27 books published by GW which should be considered the reliable source, and anything else is potentially unreliable.
To do otherwise is the same as deleting any entry about Harry Potter because the only source is the author, J K Rowling, or any entry about Star Wars which is based on the 6 movies, since that would not be 'independent' of George Lucas, leaving only the non-Lucas stuff. Clearly mad.
Indeed, the most irritating thing about Wikipedia is the whole "notable" requirement that the Powers that Be seem to take very seriously. I can't understand someone who would want to restrict the amount of information available.
The problem is that all the articles become unnavigable messses of shit trivia and geek mastubatry nonsense. The idea is that this should be a usable reference for a general audience, not a competition against other nerds to crap up articles.
Dont like it? Start your own wiki. Thats the real beauty of the internet. These guys did it and thank god that junk isnt crowding all the pages on wikipedia.
Also, im just sick of reading a general topic, something unrelated to sci-fi and then seeing links like "He also shares the name of a popular Anime character" or "Nuclear aggression was also a topic on this episode of Star Trek."
The deletion policies have really saved wikipedia from becoming a horrible testament to nerd memorization skills and boredom.
How does it detract? Again, the fact that articles are in the database doesn't make it any slower for you to find the article you're actually interested in. And if something is irrelevant to an article, the link inside that article can be deleted.
Basically, I'm saying that you should orphan where appropriate, but not delete. That keeps those who are looking for the "fancruft" you're not happy while still leaving the mainstream articles you want unmolested.
But there's always going to be some idiot that thinks that the entry on Sapporo, Japan should link to every anime episode set there.
So why not have a link at the bottom of the Sapporo page to List of every anime episode set in Sapporo, Japan? And if those links become too much, then replace them with List of trivia about Sapporo, Japan? There is simply no reason to delete stuff that is true and of interest to someone, no matter how tiny that minority is.
The problem is that all the articles become unnavigable messses of shit trivia and geek mastubatry nonsense. The idea is that this should be a usable reference for a general audience, not a competition against other nerds to crap up articles.
Well, so basically it should only contain the list of Britney Spears and Back Street Boys songs, plus the quick answers to high school tests? That's what the general audience is interested in.
Is quantum physics supposed to even be there, if we're talking about general audiences? As someone who had a genuine passion for physics, I can tell you that that shit is hard. It's abstract thinking at its finest. You can imagine bodies sliding down slopes in your head, or gases expanding in tubes, you can even picture relativistic stuff, but quantum mechanics pretty much requires you to not even try. Any kind of RL intuition you might apply to it is actually _the_ source of misunderstandings and getting it wrong.
So how many people genuinely need that on Wikipedia? For 99% of the population it's something they'll never really need, and would need more effort to understand than they're willing to put into anything. Some people probably aren't even wired to ever understand it. And I don't even necessarily mean that in an elitist or demeaning way, they're just wired for a whole other class of endeavours.
And whoever really needs to understand Hawking radiation, already has better sources than that. (And isn't that the mantra anyway? It's not a primary source, you need to check everything you read on Wikipedia.)
So is it a kind of geek masturbatory exercise too? It's most definitely _not_ for a general audience.
Seems to me like there isn't that much difference. If you don't want to read something, be it quantum stuff or the list of everything Bart wrote on the blackboard, don't look at those pages, right? It's not like someone drags you kicking and screaming to those pages.
Also, im just sick of reading a general topic, something unrelated to sci-fi and then seeing links like "He also shares the name of a popular Anime character" or "Nuclear aggression was also a topic on this episode of Star Trek."
Absolutely.
A definite pet peeve of mine is the cancerous In popular culture sections that sprout out of innocent articles of all kinds. Invariably they are a random mess of trivia informing us where this subject has been mentioned in various editors' favourite music/tv show/film. Of absolutely no interest to anyone else, completely unreferenced and unverifiable, and of zero significance to the actual subject of the article. It's almost as if people believe that some subjects require a passing mentioned
"Somoene's going to come in here and say that the problem isn't the topic, it's that the articles are either original research, aren't verifiable, or aren't "notable""
Hello! Yes, actually the first two issues are a big part of the problem. Most of the Wikipedia fancruft I've seen uses only the original fictional source as a reference, meaning that you're ultimately reading through someone's attempt to wrestle a body of fiction into a coherent self-consistent reality, often an impossible task, and certain
Wikipedia has the problem that... well, tons of things have both virtual and real:
It's a lot easier to delete work than to create it.
I mean, it took God-knows how many dozens of people to write that Warhammer guide after God-knows how many man-hours of work researching, typing, and editing it all. And it takes an editor 30 seconds to delete it all, poof, gone.
And of course, there are lots of a-holes who basically get their only joy in life from deleting somebody else's work; there's more than a little trut
And of course, there are lots of a-holes who basically get their only joy in life from deleting somebody else's work
Just the other week, I was wondering about bash.org (which has been down for quite some time) and looked it up on wikipedia. It was deleted because it "is not covered in reliable published works". But if you check out the deletion log [wikipedia.org], you'll see in it a user named Bit trollent that has "vowed to destroy Wikipedia" by voting to delete articles. *sigh*
Somoene's going to come in here and say that the problem isn't the topic, it's that the articles are either original research, aren't verifiable, or aren't "notable"
A couple weeks back, someone went through and deleted all the cultural references for Venture Bros. episodes on the grounds that they were all original research and didn't include any quotes from the creators showing that the references were intentional. The deleted references included things like explaining that when a character says, "Like Patty Smyth before me, I am a warrior," he's referencing the hit song "The Warrior" by the band Scandal, of which Patty Smyth was the lead singer. When this was pointed out to him, he said that the episode wasn't a valid source.
Someone needs to create a new Wikipedia that's more Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy than Encyclopedia Galactica.
I honestly don't get the whole hate that Wikipedia seems to have against sci-fi and geeky topics... I think it's an attack by people who figure that if they have too much of it that Wikipedia won't resemble an old media encylopedia.
It's not just sci-fi and geeky topics. It's the whole "low-brow" and "high-brow" battle that has always existed. It's pretty annoying, but anytime people add information that others consider "low-brow" (which happens a lot with pop-culture topics), people complain that it's diminishing wikipedia.
I personally believe Wikipedia's strength is in how it contains information about a large number of topics traditional encyclopedias wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. All that it needs is one editor that is in
I honestly don't get the whole hate that Wikipedia seems to have against sci-fi and geeky topics...
You have the cause and effect the wrong way around here. It's not that Wikipedia hates sci-fi and geeky topics, it's that sci-fi fans and geeks love Wikipedia. Consequently they are willing to spend hour upon hour of detailing fancruft into Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia doesn't want fancruft, of any sort. Wikipedia is not a fansite. It doesn't care about minor Stargate SG-1 plotline discrepancies that a single obsessive thinks he has noticed and simply must tell the world about. It's not interested in
Except you are not Wikipedia's users. I am not Wikipedia's users. I am one of them, but I don't deign to control what those users write. I don't think admins should be in that position either. If you want to create more mainstream articles, try to get people interested in creating them, not deleting other articles so that the mainstream ones have a larger overall ratio.
Often it boils down to "I don't know much about this topic and I don't care about it, thus it's irrelevant". Thus you end up with entire fields of topics automatically getting marked for deletion - as happened to webcomics a couple months ago, with some fairly well-known comics getting tossed out for being not notable, while a page about the TV station the main character of a short-lived 80s TV series worked for [wikipedia.org] survived more than thirty revisions over five years. I agree that Max Headroom was cool, but Net
by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday September 17 2008, @05:04PM (#25045755)
There used to be an article on the notable unix programmer Norman Waslh before they deleted it. They also deleted the article about "Rubbish, King of the Jumble" as not notable despite being a popular cartoon on CITV in the 1990s. If you want your knowledge to stay, use inclusionist wikis instead. I like websites such as Wikia because they have a lot of articles about what Wikipedia calls cruft and also many independant wikis such as mariowiki and bulbapedia. Remember that all Wikipedia articles have been licenced under the GFDL so transwiki as many articles as you can, exploiting the streisand effect.
I have also been blocked from Wikipedia for a year because of a vandal sharing my IP address and the admins won't unblock.
Take a look at this article [wikipedia.org]. Half of those lodges get articles deleted all the time and that article itself gets nominated for deletion all the time. Yet articles about Penny Arcade while a very funny cartoon I enjoy stays? WTF, there notion of notable is quite honestly fucked. Yes there is a general article about Freemasonry but each state's Grand Lodge have a long history that is often interlinked to the founding of that state. My own state of Utah has a very long history with freemasons and the Grand Lodge of Utah has a very interesting histroy that can be verified quite easily. So a Lodge with 100+ years of history isn't notable but a comic strip is? Sorry but PA isn't Garfield or Peanuts. It's nothing but a popularity contest and the people with the most amount of time to waste win the notable contest unless and admin (biased quite heavily) does something.
This is not a normal encyclopedia where having an entry takes up literal space on a page, and technically slows you down when finding the article you're actually looking for. This is the internet, where if you don't care about the many variations on the RX-78 Gundam, you don't have to ever see them. Unless wikipedia is running their fucking site off of an old 20 gig IDE hard drive, there's no reason to be deleting entries that are well-written and useful to someone.
Smaller wikis tend to have a very specific focus and, thus, rational reasons to keep or delete. I work on the Battlestar Wiki, which obviously needs an article on Commander Adama but wouldn't keep articles on James Kirk on it...that's the Memory Alpha wiki's job.
Even Deletionpedia focuses on one thing...and does it so well, it doesn't need editing!
Wikipedia is trying to catalog the world as a general encyclopedia. But paradoxically they edit out things from the world.
That's what Wikia is for - to hold all the fancruft. Wikia hosts the Star [Wars|Gate|Trek|Craft] fancruft. It's almost all popular culture. It's become Wikipedia's slush pile.
Wikia takes advertising, but since its demographic lives in their parents' basement, the ads aren't worth much.
Personally, I'd like to kick most of the popular culture out of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia isn't very good at it. Wikipedia is worse at movies than IMDB. It's worse at music than Gracenote. It's worse at fancruft than Wikia. Export the articles for each Pokemon to Wikia and be done with it.
See if that doesn't convince you of the soundness of Wikipedia's judgments (which, perhaps I should say, are not made by administrators, but hashed out in group discussions to which all Wikipedia editors may contribute).
"Sean Cragg is the coolest dude alive. he thinks. And he sneezes like he is Vomiting:P"
"Normo: A derogatory term to refer a person (Normal) who fears people with mental disabilities"
"Josh Himberg the man. He runs the NHS like its his bisnuss."
Basically, the admins of Wikipedia are trying to make WP into a 'legitimate' encyclopedia. Unfortunately, no high school or college prof in their right mind is ever, ever going to allow Wikipedia as a source in any sort of assignment. WP is useful for a quick lookup of something but considering it's about as reliable as Tom Cruise's sanity, anyone who relies on it is getting what they asked for.
So all these attempts to make Wikipedia a 'legitimate' information source are hilarious at best and sad at worst. Being a 'wikipedia admin' is not going to give you academia cred, ever, and it's not going to make for any sort of remotely useful e-peen. These deletions are just people trying, desperately, to make Wiki into something it never will be.
Whatever happened to Wikipedia being 'Everything about Everything?'
wiki functionality (Score:4, Insightful)
also. i think it's slashdotted.
Re:wiki functionality (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:wiki functionality (Score:5, Insightful)
No, just that many "Wikipedia Admins" (as opposed to active editors who don't seek special status) are sewer rejects who flock to Wikipedia because it lets them abuse power. Deletionists especially are a fucking retarded subclass of the rest, whose sole contribution to society is deleting something someone else did.
Wikipedia rocks. It's too bad so many people are dedicated to pissing all over it.
Parent
Re:wiki functionality (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia rocks. It's too bad so many people are dedicated to pissing all over it.
The concept rocks.
The actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired. The simple fact that Deletionism has been a hot subject for debate for at least two years (probably longer) and they still haven't implemented a solution, where it took other wikis (say, Citizendium) about three months to do so, is testament to that.
I stand by my journal entry. As long as any random fucktard can come over and get my article, and thus possibly hours of work, deleted for no good reason, I see no reason to contribute those hours.
Parent
Re:wiki functionality (Score:5, Insightful)
I am inclined to agree. I'd rather have too much stuff and the problem of organizing it than too little. I find Wikipedia's standard of relevance occasionally capricious and arbitrary.
I'd rather that data that has a narrow and specific audience get factored into subarticles rather than deleted. After all, someone worked to bring the data into a presentable format. Deletion serves nobody except the lazy and uninterested. A "see also" type link which points to the true esoteric information would serve the hard-core.
There's not even a compelling bandwidth argument. The notion of whether something is encyclopedic might make sense when drawing a cut line for a print edition, but sending an elaborate 404 page isn't much different than sending a narrow-interest article in terms of bandwidth.
I guess what I am getting at is that filtering for quality is often more likely to be objective than subjective, filtering for relevance is sometimes a bit subjective, and filtering for appeal is much more so. High quality contributions are valuable, regardless of the broadness of their appeal. There are media for which it makes sense to draw a cut line, but a search driven electronic format isn't so constrained.
I don't see what Wikipedia loses by keeping around narrow-interest articles as long as they're factual and neutral. If I happen to catalog all of the chalkboard gags, that takes nothing away from anything else. Sure, it won't be a featured article of the day. So what?
Wikipedia does lose when there's a large number of truly worthless or misleading articles. Those should get the axe. But those are worthless or misleading because their data is absent or inaccurate. I imagine sheer peer recognition of their crumminess would force them out of commission.
Parent
Specialized wikis (Score:4, Insightful)
There's not even a compelling bandwidth argument. The notion of whether something is encyclopedic might make sense when drawing a cut line for a print edition, but sending an elaborate 404 page isn't much different than sending a narrow-interest article in terms of bandwidth.
Granted, the supporting media isn't a limiting factor on on-line encyclopaedia like it is on dead-tree version. *but* there is still a limiting resource : netizens with enough interests to maintain the article.
I don't see what Wikipedia loses by keeping around narrow-interest articles as long as they're factual and neutral. If I happen to catalog all of the chalkboard gags, that takes nothing away from anything else. {...} Wikipedia does lose when there's a large number of truly worthless or misleading articles. Those should get the axe. But those are worthless or misleading because their data is absent or inaccurate.
Well, that's exactly where there's a conflict.
If you're the only single person interested in writing a list of chalkboard gags for wikipedia, chance are there won't be anyone else to maintain it and make sure it stay accurate and correct.
When a subjet is *definitely* too narrow, it's best to only leave in wikipedia itself a short summary (as a standalone article or a section in the Simpson's article) explain *what* these gags are, and then reference this list through a link pointing a separate wiki which is specialised in Simpson (I'm not sure but there's bound to be one somewhere).
That's already the case for lots of other stuff, StarWars universe is only described superficially in wikipedia and everything more detailed goes in Wookipedia. Star Trek doesn't need a full standalone page for every single minor caracter ever mentioned in the show : those usually are better living on Memory Alpha.
Even "House M.D." episode are shortly summarized with links to external blog which go into deep exhaustive details criticizing the medical accuracy for absolutely every detail.
Writing an article that mostly nobody does give a damn about doesn't stop at the writing. There's a lot of subsequent maintenance that needs to be done : fixing vandalism, removing spam, keeping it up-to-dat, correcting mistake, etc.
If a subject isn't popular enough, the article is going to rot.
There are already thousand of ultra specialised wikis out-there maintained by hard-core fans that are suffisently dedicated and no-lifers to attend correctly to such article as those articles deserve.
That's also why Deletionpedia plays a capital role : as a temporary graveyard where to store such kind of too much specialised lists, which are too much details and not enough interest for wikipedia. But don't have yet an actively maintained copy somewhere on some hardcore-fan wiki.
Parent
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Do you have an example of an article of yours that was unfairly deleted?
Two or three, yes. Unfortunately, a delete also means the destruction of the edit history and talk page, otherwise I'd link to them and you could check for yourself whether or not you agree. ,-)
An encyclopedia is especially where being notable is important,
Says who?
Merriam Webster says:
Main Entry:
encyclopedia Listen to the pronunciation of encyclopedia
Pronunciation:
\in-s-kl-p-d-\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Medieval Latin encyclopaedia course of general educati
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to love Wikipedia, but it has been guided into a ditch. They are have a very distinct world view and anything not fitting into that gets removed completely or edited out. There are certain subjects you cannot keep to their own page if on the site at all even with real sources simply because it does not fit their view of what is right.
I use Wikipedia to find only stuff I don't lose value with if its wrong
Like episode names from tv series
When movies came out
songs by artist
people who passed away nearl
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is it so horrible to have that stuff there? Seriously,I want to know. The Wikipedia entries(at least for me) is always gotten to by either Google or the search on the home page,so I wouldn't even know they HAD a "every weapon in Warhammer" page if I didn't specifically go looking for it. Now for stuff that is bold faced lies or spin,yeah I can see deleting it. The last thing we need is another source of spin.
But just because some think the knowledge is stupid doesn't mean it should be tossed. If for
Slashdotted... (Score:2, Insightful)
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@deletionpedia.dbatley.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The place went down while the story was still in the firehose.
Fancruft (Score:5, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you.
I honestly don't get the whole hate that Wikipedia seems to have against sci-fi and geeky topics... I think it's an attack by people who figure that if they have too much of it that Wikipedia won't resemble an old media encylopedia. This argument is pretty stupid, given the nigh-unlimited space in their database (Wikipedia themselves have said not to worry about performance [wikipedia.org]).
Somoene's going to come in here and say that the problem isn't the topic, it's that the articles are either original research, aren't verifiable, or aren't "notable" (the latter is the worst argument I've heard), but IMNSHO there is a definite bias, especially among admins, against these types of articles.
Oh, and tell the Wikitruth [wikitruth.info].
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The problem is, if you DO allow it the door will be opened for every trivial matter you can think of.
I for one, welcome an article about my daily morning routine.
Re:Fancruft (Score:5, Insightful)
So here's a question. Other than attacks, racism, unverifiable information and such (which are already banned under other Wikipedia guidelines), what real effect would it have on the encyclopedia other than another record in the database that nobody other than the author would ever access?
Remember, anyone could take an irrelevant link to the article out of other, more accessed articles where it doesn't belong, so the chances of someone seeing it would be next to nil with the exception of the Random Page button (which itself could weight pages by the number of accesses they've had already, or possibly number of incoming links a page has, in order to make the chances of finding such useless pages next to nil as well).
Besides, something as personal as a "daily morning routine" would be a perfect candidate to be moved to userspace... they could leave a redirect if you like.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Heretics! How dare you question the great Wikipedia's policies! They are infallible!
*cough*
Maybe we're not ignorant. Maybe we just disagree.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In my experience at Slashdot (and I have quite a bit, if you look at my user summary... I think I started in 2001 or 2002), if you present an argument against the general consensus in a way that is thought-out, well-spoken, and most importantly not insulting , you'll get modded up.
Here, though, I think you're missing the point, and that is that I posted in several threads, if not my initial comment (I was the OP), that a) there is a bias in what administrators will vote to delete even if they find other pol
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Dismissing all primary sources as unreliable a priori would be silly, if it weren't so intellectually bankrupt.
Re:This is unbelievable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which in this case is ridiculuous, Games Workshop created the Warhammer universe and retain creative control over it. It is thus impossible for an authoritative source listing the 'Weapons of the Imperium' to exist independently of GW; in fact, it is precisely the 27 books published by GW which should be considered the reliable source, and anything else is potentially unreliable.
To do otherwise is the same as deleting any entry about Harry Potter because the only source is the author, J K Rowling, or any entry about Star Wars which is based on the 6 movies, since that would not be 'independent' of George Lucas, leaving only the non-Lucas stuff. Clearly mad.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'll start an list article for "Every trivial matter you can think of".
Re:Fancruft (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, the most irritating thing about Wikipedia is the whole "notable" requirement that the Powers that Be seem to take very seriously. I can't understand someone who would want to restrict the amount of information available.
Parent
Re:Fancruft (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that all the articles become unnavigable messses of shit trivia and geek mastubatry nonsense. The idea is that this should be a usable reference for a general audience, not a competition against other nerds to crap up articles.
Dont like it? Start your own wiki. Thats the real beauty of the internet. These guys did it and thank god that junk isnt crowding all the pages on wikipedia.
Also, im just sick of reading a general topic, something unrelated to sci-fi and then seeing links like "He also shares the name of a popular Anime character" or "Nuclear aggression was also a topic on this episode of Star Trek."
The deletion policies have really saved wikipedia from becoming a horrible testament to nerd memorization skills and boredom.
Parent
Re:Fancruft (Score:4, Insightful)
So you don't like it [wikipedia.org], then?
Parent
Re:Fancruft (Score:4, Insightful)
How does it detract? Again, the fact that articles are in the database doesn't make it any slower for you to find the article you're actually interested in. And if something is irrelevant to an article, the link inside that article can be deleted.
Basically, I'm saying that you should orphan where appropriate, but not delete. That keeps those who are looking for the "fancruft" you're not happy while still leaving the mainstream articles you want unmolested.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But there's always going to be some idiot that thinks that the entry on Sapporo, Japan should link to every anime episode set there.
So why not have a link at the bottom of the Sapporo page to List of every anime episode set in Sapporo, Japan? And if those links become too much, then replace them with List of trivia about Sapporo, Japan? There is simply no reason to delete stuff that is true and of interest to someone, no matter how tiny that minority is.
Rich.
Who decides that? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, so basically it should only contain the list of Britney Spears and Back Street Boys songs, plus the quick answers to high school tests? That's what the general audience is interested in.
Is quantum physics supposed to even be there, if we're talking about general audiences? As someone who had a genuine passion for physics, I can tell you that that shit is hard. It's abstract thinking at its finest. You can imagine bodies sliding down slopes in your head, or gases expanding in tubes, you can even picture relativistic stuff, but quantum mechanics pretty much requires you to not even try. Any kind of RL intuition you might apply to it is actually _the_ source of misunderstandings and getting it wrong.
So how many people genuinely need that on Wikipedia? For 99% of the population it's something they'll never really need, and would need more effort to understand than they're willing to put into anything. Some people probably aren't even wired to ever understand it. And I don't even necessarily mean that in an elitist or demeaning way, they're just wired for a whole other class of endeavours.
And whoever really needs to understand Hawking radiation, already has better sources than that. (And isn't that the mantra anyway? It's not a primary source, you need to check everything you read on Wikipedia.)
So is it a kind of geek masturbatory exercise too? It's most definitely _not_ for a general audience.
Seems to me like there isn't that much difference. If you don't want to read something, be it quantum stuff or the list of everything Bart wrote on the blackboard, don't look at those pages, right? It's not like someone drags you kicking and screaming to those pages.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, im just sick of reading a general topic, something unrelated to sci-fi and then seeing links like "He also shares the name of a popular Anime character" or "Nuclear aggression was also a topic on this episode of Star Trek."
Absolutely.
A definite pet peeve of mine is the cancerous In popular culture sections that sprout out of innocent articles of all kinds. Invariably they are a random mess of trivia informing us where this subject has been mentioned in various editors' favourite music/tv show/film. Of absolutely no interest to anyone else, completely unreferenced and unverifiable, and of zero significance to the actual subject of the article. It's almost as if people believe that some subjects require a passing mentioned
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hello! Yes, actually the first two issues are a big part of the problem. Most of the Wikipedia fancruft I've seen uses only the original fictional source as a reference, meaning that you're ultimately reading through someone's attempt to wrestle a body of fiction into a coherent self-consistent reality, often an impossible task, and certain
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Wikipedia has the problem that ... well, tons of things have both virtual and real:
It's a lot easier to delete work than to create it.
I mean, it took God-knows how many dozens of people to write that Warhammer guide after God-knows how many man-hours of work researching, typing, and editing it all. And it takes an editor 30 seconds to delete it all, poof, gone.
And of course, there are lots of a-holes who basically get their only joy in life from deleting somebody else's work; there's more than a little trut
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Just the other week, I was wondering about bash.org (which has been down for quite some time) and looked it up on wikipedia. It was deleted because it "is not covered in reliable published works". But if you check out the deletion log [wikipedia.org], you'll see in it a user named Bit trollent that has "vowed to destroy Wikipedia" by voting to delete articles. *sigh*
Re:Fancruft (Score:4, Insightful)
A couple weeks back, someone went through and deleted all the cultural references for Venture Bros. episodes on the grounds that they were all original research and didn't include any quotes from the creators showing that the references were intentional. The deleted references included things like explaining that when a character says, "Like Patty Smyth before me, I am a warrior," he's referencing the hit song "The Warrior" by the band Scandal, of which Patty Smyth was the lead singer. When this was pointed out to him, he said that the episode wasn't a valid source.
Someone needs to create a new Wikipedia that's more Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy than Encyclopedia Galactica.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I honestly don't get the whole hate that Wikipedia seems to have against sci-fi and geeky topics... I think it's an attack by people who figure that if they have too much of it that Wikipedia won't resemble an old media encylopedia.
It's not just sci-fi and geeky topics. It's the whole "low-brow" and "high-brow" battle that has always existed. It's pretty annoying, but anytime people add information that others consider "low-brow" (which happens a lot with pop-culture topics), people complain that it's diminishing wikipedia.
I personally believe Wikipedia's strength is in how it contains information about a large number of topics traditional encyclopedias wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. All that it needs is one editor that is in
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I honestly don't get the whole hate that Wikipedia seems to have against sci-fi and geeky topics...
You have the cause and effect the wrong way around here. It's not that Wikipedia hates sci-fi and geeky topics, it's that sci-fi fans and geeks love Wikipedia. Consequently they are willing to spend hour upon hour of detailing fancruft into Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia doesn't want fancruft, of any sort. Wikipedia is not a fansite. It doesn't care about minor Stargate SG-1 plotline discrepancies that a single obsessive thinks he has noticed and simply must tell the world about. It's not interested in
Re:Fancruft (Score:4, Insightful)
Except you are not Wikipedia's users. I am not Wikipedia's users. I am one of them, but I don't deign to control what those users write. I don't think admins should be in that position either. If you want to create more mainstream articles, try to get people interested in creating them, not deleting other articles so that the mainstream ones have a larger overall ratio.
Parent
not just deleted topics... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm certain there is quite a bit of interesting information that's been excised from still-existing topics that should also be explored.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
[[citation needed]]
Turtles all the way down... (Score:2)
Nazi moderation at WikiPaedia (Score:4, Insightful)
a page listing every chalkboard gag in The Simpsons opening credits
Sad, that's actually a useful list! And surely socially and culturally relevant too.
I find it childish of Wikipedia to actually delete articles that would be interesting to some people at least.
Sane moderation is not easy. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's called deletionism (Score:4, Informative)
There used to be an article on the notable unix programmer Norman Waslh before they deleted it. They also deleted the article about "Rubbish, King of the Jumble" as not notable despite being a popular cartoon on CITV in the 1990s. If you want your knowledge to stay, use inclusionist wikis instead. I like websites such as Wikia because they have a lot of articles about what Wikipedia calls cruft and also many independant wikis such as mariowiki and bulbapedia. Remember that all Wikipedia articles have been licenced under the GFDL so transwiki as many articles as you can, exploiting the streisand effect.
I have also been blocked from Wikipedia for a year because of a vandal sharing my IP address and the admins won't unblock.
It's not just geek stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Binary armageddon (Score:4, Funny)
They're about to hit 65536 articles.
Deletionism is bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Deletionism is just one big stupid power trip.
Deletionism is NOT bullshit (Score:3, Informative)
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a directory of everything.
If you want a directory of everything, try here:
No deletionism! [google.com]
What Deletionpedia Has and Wikipedia Hasn't (Score:5, Interesting)
A focus.
Smaller wikis tend to have a very specific focus and, thus, rational reasons to keep or delete. I work on the Battlestar Wiki, which obviously needs an article on Commander Adama but wouldn't keep articles on James Kirk on it...that's the Memory Alpha wiki's job.
Even Deletionpedia focuses on one thing...and does it so well, it doesn't need editing!
Wikipedia is trying to catalog the world as a general encyclopedia. But paradoxically they edit out things from the world.
The result? A reason to post elsewhere.
Nicholson Baker writes on the Deletopedia (Score:3, Interesting)
The author Nicholson Baker wrote an interesting piece on the Deleteopedia earlier this year:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/wikipedia.internet [guardian.co.uk]
Worth a read if you've not seen it.
That's what Wikia is for (Score:3, Informative)
That's what Wikia is for - to hold all the fancruft. Wikia hosts the Star [Wars|Gate|Trek|Craft] fancruft. It's almost all popular culture. It's become Wikipedia's slush pile. Wikia takes advertising, but since its demographic lives in their parents' basement, the ads aren't worth much.
Personally, I'd like to kick most of the popular culture out of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia isn't very good at it. Wikipedia is worse at movies than IMDB. It's worse at music than Gracenote. It's worse at fancruft than Wikia. Export the articles for each Pokemon to Wikia and be done with it.
Try ten clicks on the "random page" button. (Score:4, Insightful)
See if that doesn't convince you of the soundness of Wikipedia's judgments (which, perhaps I should say, are not made by administrators, but hashed out in group discussions to which all Wikipedia editors may contribute).
"Sean Cragg is the coolest dude alive. he thinks. And he sneezes like he is Vomiting :P"
"Normo: A derogatory term to refer a person (Normal) who fears people with mental disabilities"
"Josh Himberg the man. He runs the NHS like its his bisnuss."
These are buried treasure?
Wikipedia Is Trying To Be 'Legit' (Score:4, Insightful)
Basically, the admins of Wikipedia are trying to make WP into a 'legitimate' encyclopedia. Unfortunately, no high school or college prof in their right mind is ever, ever going to allow Wikipedia as a source in any sort of assignment. WP is useful for a quick lookup of something but considering it's about as reliable as Tom Cruise's sanity, anyone who relies on it is getting what they asked for.
So all these attempts to make Wikipedia a 'legitimate' information source are hilarious at best and sad at worst. Being a 'wikipedia admin' is not going to give you academia cred, ever, and it's not going to make for any sort of remotely useful e-peen. These deletions are just people trying, desperately, to make Wiki into something it never will be.
Whatever happened to Wikipedia being 'Everything about Everything?'
Wikipedia page added (Score:4, Insightful)
Better check it fast, though-- within one minute of writing it, I notice it's tagged for Speedy deletion!