Wikipedia, Notability, and Open Source Software, Part 2 | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia, Notability, and Open Source Software, Part 2

ubuntard.com

35 pointsEricBurnett12 comments

The English Wikipedia has a particular philosophy regarding notability / citation (It's actually much more liberal than the German Wikipedia) that some people find contrary to their personal desires for a more "free/open" Encyclopedia. I've often wondered why they don't just fork wikipedia and go build their own and see if it is more successful.

What a lot of people fail to realize, is that there are actually _two_ common use "Sum of human knowledge" indexes. Wikipedia is just one. The other one is usually in the upper right hand of your browser. Put high quality content out there, organize it, and link to it, and it will be found.

The dwm people (and I'm a huge fan of keeping dwm in wikipedia, I really do think it's quite a notable WM) were never, ever in risk of people not being able to find excellent reference material on their WM - and isn't that, at the end of the day, what really counts?

What I think burns people about the deleting isn't that the info can't be found, but that WP is, in effect, judging what's important and what's not. Considering the amount of crap in WP that's not deleted, it's kind of insulting to say "you're less important than this."

Click random article a few times. I just did 3 times. The first article was good (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae_Yih), the second two are kind of ridiculous (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesley_Elliott and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Fox).

I guess the question is, are the administrators applying the rules fairly and consistently, or is there some bias which betrays their supposed NPOV (Neutral Point of View)?

Seriously, there are some AMAZING encyclopedias which consist of material that is 99% unsuitable for inclusion in Wikipedia. I'm thinking of things like snopes, tvtropes. etc...

The community that cares about DWM, FVWM, Compiz, lwm wm, xwm (all of which I've used at one point or another, and, only half of which are currently in wikipedia) should do likewise, create their WM Encyclopedia - (wmipedia? wmtrove?) and just tell wikipedia to go stuff it.

The question as to where to draw the line is a little gray - I _personally_ think that all widely deployed (That is, more than a couple thousand users) systems like Window Managers, Linux Distros, Applications, should have a home on wikipedia - My home town of Lumby only has a population of 1800 people, and it managed to get an article - why is a window manager that is home to 10s of thousands of people any less notable?

I think every release of Linus's linux kernel should have its own page on wikipedia. (Check out "http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges and tell me that each release isn't notable).

My only requirement is that it have _some_ breadth of interest beyond the author who writes the article, and that the material maintain a high level of quality, NPOV, and citation.

But, I'm clearly one of those lumped in the "Inclusionist" world - which is clearly a direction the English Wikipedia is not going.

Why are things like tvtropes not suitable for an Encyclopedia?

I mean, you take it as obvious that such material is not suitable for WP, but I wonder why? It's not clear to me.

tvtropes _is_ an encyclopedia.

Re: material not suitable for WP - most of it fails the notability clause. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notability_in_Wikipedia

Well, it might not belong in its present form—but, since they're compatible and cite each other fairly frequently, it'd be nice if the entirety of other encyclopedias could exist "attached" to Wikipedia somehow, so that any archival efforts going into Wikipedia would bring them along as well. Since wikis are usually "flat" namespaces, perhaps as subgraphs (that is, subdirectories)?

There are so many wikis that are basically "Wikipedia, but for this particular topic that on its own isn't notable enough"—if these could all be merged into Wikipedia this way, the ecosystems of both Wikipedia and its offshoots would probably be a lot better off. The members of each wouldn't be tending only their own own walled gardens, but rather crosslinking and cross-editing more heavily—and putting things where they really belong, instead of trying to justify their inclusion into their own project of residence!

They wouldn't even need to exist "within" wikipedia physically; perhaps Mediawiki could adopt something that works for articles like Trackbacks work for blogs, where all articles from all "public encyclopaedia of [topic] project" Mediawikis show up in one another's indexes?

A limited form of what you are describing already exists. MediaWiki supports something called 'interwiki links',* so you can write e.g. [[TVtropes:PlotThreads]] to link directly to the Plot Threads page on TV tropes. In this way many disparate wikis can be wired together quite simply, if desired. I don't remember if the software supports shared indexes or backlinks or anything of that kind, however, although that is available between sister projects (such as Wikipedia and Wikitionary).

Culturally, however, Wikipedia seems to frown upon using this kind of link to external encyclopedias. If information is notable, it should be included in Wikipedia or one of the sister projects; if it is a source, it should be referenced as such. Any kind of 'more information' external page doesn't really have a place in such a system. So we're back to needing to 'fix' Wikipedia.

* See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map for the current list of supported interwiki prefixes.

Why is the current notability clause the right one for Wikipedia? (I don't think it is. I think it's needlessly exclusionary.)

"I guess the question is, are the administrators applying the rules fairly and consistently"

The answer to that is pretty much no. But it's against WP policy to point out inconsistencies.

I think the key is that Wikipedia's definition of notability is not about "judging what's important and what's not" and the name notability is actively misleading.

I was under the impression that it was about what could be easily confirmed in reliable secondary sources. However, when you read the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability page itself you see they've fallen into the trap of their own poor naming choice and the text veers between saying the information needs to be easily checkable and the information needs to be worthy of being in Wikipedia.

I think a rebranding could fix this, but I'm generally over-sensitive to the particular meanings of words.

I think there is merit in trying to "fix" wikipedia. The solution shouldn't always be "I'll make my own and get it right"

> were never, ever in risk of people not being able to find excellent reference material on their WM - and isn't that, at the end of the day, what really counts?

"At the end of the day" is the important bit there. In 100 years, will dwm or any of its source still exist? Perhaps. Will Wikipedia still exist? Much more likely. If I'm researching historical window managers of 2010 to get my freshly-unearthed ThinkPad running for the National Museum of Science exhibit, where will I look? What will I find? What won't I find?

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