Saving Geek Lore and Other Wikipedia Castoffs

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.

wiki functionality

if it uses mediawiki, it has wiki functionality. just not for you

also. i think it's slashdotted.

Re:wiki functionality

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.

Re:wiki functionality

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.

Re:wiki functionality

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.

Re:wiki functionality

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.

Fancruft

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.

Oh, and tell the Wikitruth [wikitruth.info].

Re:Fancruft

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.

Re:Fancruft

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.

Re:Fancruft

So you don't like it [wikipedia.org], then?

Re:Fancruft

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.

Who decides that?

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.

Re:Fancruft

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.

Re:Fancruft

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.

Re:This is unbelievable.

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.

Re:Fancruft

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.

not just deleted topics...

I'm certain there is quite a bit of interesting information that's been excised from still-existing topics that should also be explored.

Nazi moderation at WikiPaedia

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.

It's called deletionism

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

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.

Binary armageddon

They're about to hit 65536 articles.

Deletionism is bullshit

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.

Deletionism is just one big stupid power trip.

What Deletionpedia Has and Wikipedia Hasn't

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.

Try ten clicks on the "random page" button.

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'

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

Well, it seems Deletionpedia is notable, so I wrote a Wikipedia page for it [wikipedia.org].

Better check it fast, though-- within one minute of writing it, I notice it's tagged for Speedy deletion!