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, in protest at 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? Is Deletionism becoming a dominant ethos on Wikipedia? Are the right people holding the reigns?"
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I'm amazed there's anything in wikipedia between the notability purges and the fact that pages frequenctly get AfD'd for being incomplete within a few hours of creating them.
Admins routinely ignore established policies but their decisions are only reviews by other admins which pretty much support each other.
Is Wikipedia running out of disk space? No? Then who cares how "notable" something is? Someone should explain to these guys that the whole idea behind the Internet is that you get the information you ask for. You're not bothered, by definition, by information that you didn't request. The mere presence of an article on Penny Arcade doesn't lessen the stature of an article on Bill Mauldin, does it?
If you insist on maintaining a "notability" standard, then make its coefficient(s) user-editable, like everyth
The difficulty in creating an encyclopedia has never been finding enough paper to store it or enough glue to bind it. Likewise, the challenge before Wikipedia is not to simply find sufficient disk space and bandwidth -- it's to find a way to organize knowledge that maximizes what it offers to readers. Filling it with, for example, 27 different ways to list Pokemon characters [wikipedia.org] is surely a low-priority task compared to the huge deficits still remaining in nonwestern history, literature, and culture articles.
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not
certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-- Albert Einstein
Really Stupid, Don't Promote this Story. (Score:2)
Boycotting Wikipedia won't improve content or protect it from vandals. Shame on people who think shitting on fundraising will help.
Experience (Score:2)
Admins routinely ignore established policies but their decisions are only reviews by other admins which pretty much support each other.
Notability? What's that? (Score:2)
Someone should explain to these guys that the whole idea behind the Internet is that you get the information you ask for. You're not bothered, by definition, by information that you didn't request. The mere presence of an article on Penny Arcade doesn't lessen the stature of an article on Bill Mauldin, does it?
If you insist on maintaining a "notability" standard, then make its coefficient(s) user-editable, like everyth
Re: (Score:2)
The difficulty in creating an encyclopedia has never been finding enough paper to store it or enough glue to bind it. Likewise, the challenge before Wikipedia is not to simply find sufficient disk space and bandwidth -- it's to find a way to organize knowledge that maximizes what it offers to readers. Filling it with, for example, 27 different ways to list Pokemon characters [wikipedia.org] is surely a low-priority task compared to the huge deficits still remaining in nonwestern history, literature, and culture articles.