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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

The pro-deletion side come across as dicks, but I think they're right.

Does every piece of software ever written need a Wikipedia page? If you don't like where they're drawing the line, where would you draw it?

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Personally I think the more obscure something is the more reason to have it on Wikipedia. If I want to find out about Photoshop there are plenty of places I can go to, many of them more authoritative. If I want to find out about some obscure image editor that was briefly popular on the Amiga and then disappeared, then Wikipedia is the perfect place to start looking, since it's not like they still have (or ever had) a homepage.

Exactly! I find Wikipedia most useful for things that are obscure or trivial.

What's wrong with every software ever written having a Wikipedia page if someone cares enough to make one?

We need more than one person to maintain a Wikipedia page. Multiple people should be able to vet an article's accuracy. I think the concept of notability sometimes isn't that the topic doesn't deserve an entry, but rather that there aren't enough sources to make the entry obviously accurate.

(Granted, I understand sometimes the argument is that a topic doesn't deserve an entry.)

In that case, why not just accept a bulk-import of Freshmeat or download.com into Wikipedia? (Rationale: someone cared enough to write the description text on those sites, so it seems a safe assumption that they'd care enough to write the same text into Wikipedia were it allowed.)

Otherwise, someone would have to make their own fan site for stuff like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Buffy_the_Vampire_Slaye...

The article has been translated to 10 languages and many other articles have a reference to It.

The comprehensiveness IS one of the things on which Wikipedia has all other encyclopedias beat. Why in the name of hell would you want to take that away from it?

What would be the drawback?

It wastes 4K of storage that might otherwise be devoted to something more "notable", like a plot summary for last night's episode of Lost.

You're the only one that, however obliquely, answered my question ("Where would you draw the line?") so maybe you can explain to everyone else why you feel plot summaries from TV shows are not worthy, when the popular opinion seems to be that there is no reason to delete anything from Wikipedia.

I dare say he was being sarcastic. While there is perhaps some minimal bar on notability, it seems that it has to be a very low bar on a site that, as noted, has entries for things like episodes of TV shows or obscure cartoon characters.

Which is just as well (I hope you agree) - if people care enough about those cartoon characters, however obscure, let them have a wikipedia entry.

I think at some point it would turn Wikipedia into a huge advertisement. You'd have every person who ever came up with a product create an article about how theirs does all these great things and is better than the others. If you've ever taken a look at the recently created articles list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPages) you can see examples of this. People copy-paste text from press releases (which violates Wiki's policy on copyright because all articles are technically released under CC-BY-SA) and write text that's really heavily on the advertisements. And I think that there really needs to be some threshold in place, if only to keep that stuff at bay.

Then these articles would be flagged as commercials or violating copyright - it's a separate issue.

Wikipedia tries to have "no personal point of view" and neutral articles. Advertising would still not be ok. That is a different issue.

I myself would be fine with articles about This-andthat Inc's latest gadget if there are facts and information inside.

Meta note: This comment in my opinion asks a good question and furthers the discussion, as is evidenced by the many replies. I don't agree with it, you may not either, but that's not a good reason, in my opinion, to downvote it.

Almost every porn star has one. Why not software?

Yeah, I don't get it, what's wrong with every single open source software being a valid topic for a Wikipedia article. Every piece of open source software is of more interest than any pop singer.

What about the one I wrote in my basement?

Has anyone else besides you used it? Is anyone else on the planet interested? They yes, put it in.

The whole point of Wikipedia is to be an open source encyclopedia i.e. they're trying to open source expert's knowledge. There's no point in open sourcing open source knowledge, as you can't get reliable sources (i.e. acknowledged experts) to talk about that kind of thing much, and it's already open source anyway.

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