40% of Wikipedia is under threat from deletionists | Hacker News Reader

40% of Wikipedia is under threat from deletionists

boingboing.net

64 pointspanic50 comments

That's what led to me no longer contributing (edits or money) to Wikipedia: the deletion of articles I'd helped craft. There's always some argument about "limited resources", and conceptually I get that, but it rings hollow when you see that the deleter has edited 3,000 anime character biographies. In other words, their stuff is notable and important, but your and my articles are not.

Deletionists are a cancer and should be, well, deleted.

Sure these people are harmful, but Wikipedia rules and significance guidelines pretty much encourage this behavior. I remember musician's (it was Asura, a quite notable ambient music composer, if I remember correctly) biography being deleted. For me, the fact that I was actually searching for his biography when I found it's being deleted already shows it wasn't useless. The argument was that there's nothing that shows his significance, and relying on Wikipedia's definition of significance it was kinda hard to argue. I mean, yeah, I don't think he's got any Grammy or MTV awards or if his albums were sold in millions of copies, or some other shit relevant mostly for pop-music. It's not like he is Madonna, obviously. But within the genre he's very much well known, and if he is not notable — well, indeed I doubt even 50% of articles on Wikipedia are.

I tried to argue, and checked it later — the article was removed.

Instead, "Asura" redirects to (along with the original meaning, of course) to a dozen of movies, games and, you've guessed it — anime characters.

Sadly it's true. Please allow stub articles and trivia sections. Or was the ban of trivia section a push for Wikia of the Wikipedia founder!? So many great articles eg about fictional characters of movies, etc got deleted. I mean it's fine to remove marketing spam from companies, but it's not like insightful articles cost that much storage space, so why delete articles?

The English language version is still good to okayish. But the German language version is completely infested by deletionits. So many good articles vanished, so many photos and pictures got deleted - it's very strange that German version has such a different guidelines/standard. de.Wikipedia sincerely needs a review from international bodies.

The German Wikipedia org also maintains the toolsserver which is used for mapping and things like that for all language versions. The WikiData project also is from German branch.

Please no trivia sections. There's something incredibly embarrassing about having a short article on some fairly important subject, followed by a huge list of every time that subject was mentioned on any obscure TV show.

Culturally significant references, yes. Trivia? Don't crap up the main article with that sort of thing. An article about Person A should be about Person A; nobody cares about a song they were mentioned in 100 years after they died.

The Oxford English Dictionary (sample: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/80663) weeps. There's a lot of value to some in listing references to a topic.

There's a difference between listing three to five examples of a given usage, to demonstrate that it occurs in the wild, and exhaustively cataloging every single time a thing has been mentioned by anyone.

Certainly, but what's the cutoff? Maybe that should be a policy ("three to five inbound references are acceptable; more are not") so there's consistency.

why do you care? why cant the information exist, maybe be hidden by default, and shown after clicking an expand button.

Embarrassing for who?

I don't see problem with this kind of extra material if it's clearly marked and can be easily ignored.

The spam is in the external links sections of articles that aren't under threat of deletion. For example, about half the links on the Lemon Law article point to pages that are essentially lawyer lead funnels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_law

I was expecting something pretty dramatic when I clicked on the linked "extinction event," but it's just the same thing. I can't get a sense if this is one very frustrated person, or if this is really a worrying trend. My gut, which is notably not where I do my best thinking, is sending up various warning flares, but I lack the background knowledge to address this.

Does anyone here have some background on "deletionists" and what this blogger is generally alleging, rather than this specific and rather trivial example?

This blogger is spreading FUD about Wikipedia because she was banned from it several years ago.

> Look up a random female porn star and a random female scientist from those categories, and you'll see what deletionists prioritize. The Pokemon Bulbasaur gets 1800 words, hemovanadin gets speedily deleted.

It seems the editors who win at the moment in Wikipedia keep porn stars, delete the female scientists, keep Pokemon characters, delete scientific terms.

Another effect I've observed is misrepresenting the religiosity of the scientists and the famous people, especially those who specifically weren't religious.

Articles should be presumed useful until otherwise debated and shown not useful. The burden should be on the deleter.

I quit editing Wikipedia back in 2010 because I was fed up with deletions, after another one of my articles - which I had worked hours and hours on (and which received contributions from other editors too) - got deleted suddenly simply because some guy thought it wasn't interesting. There was no process, no prior warnings, no input from other administrators, nothing. Just one guy who though it wasn't interesting.

I quit editing and quit donating money. I'm actually surprised to see this is still a problem.

I would start donating if they would do something against this.

Basically a variant on "I would buy your $1.99 freemium app, if you only added this feature". :)

No you wouldn't.

"I would donate my time to improve Wikipedia, if not for deletionists"

How do you know?

I'm fine with this. As an example, practically every movie ever released has its own wiki page. Is that necessary? At one point does wiki stop warehousing useful/important information and become just a cabinet of curiosities (and not so curiosities)?

You're presenting a false binary: there's no reason why Wikipedia can't both warehouse useful/important information and also be a cabinet for curiosities.

There's no real cost to keeping Wikipedia articles around.

There's low storage overhead, but there's definitely a quality control cost. You have to have editors maintaining these pages which (if they are being deleted, generally) are not notable enough to have significant reputable sources devoted to them. As such, you can accumulate subtle vandalism, pranks and biased editing.

There's also a search, navigation and organization cost associated with these sorts of things. They need to be linked together, organized into categories, and if you include a bunch of non-notable garbage it's much harder for people to find the high-quality articles about notable things out there.

"Deletionists" aren't running around deleting things out of spite or something, there are good reasons for the notability guidelines.

> You have to have editors maintaining these pages which (if they are being deleted, generally) are not notable enough to have significant reputable sources devoted to them.

But Wikipedia editors are completely non-fungible. The guy who wrote the page on some obscure 80's movie isn't going to start maintaining the Civil War page with all that extra time if you delete his movie. He's just going to stop editing. So the 'quality control' reasoning doesn't hold water with me. The navigation point still stands, but that's a technology problem that can be solved.

But that introduces a huge bias toward political and scientific topics and away from anything else.

FF6? Irrelevant video game, how many wars did it win, why should it be there?

Pfizer? Why should we allow companies to have individual pages, it's just free marketing?

At some point, you cut Wikipedia's breadth down to something that could reasonably be handled by a team of a couple dozen editors. And then you might as well just go with a traditional encyclopedia.

> But that introduces a huge bias toward political and scientific topics and away from anything else.

Well, some scientific topics. An earlier Boing Boing article (http://boingboing.net/2017/02/14/watching-wikipedias-extinct...) references the WP page for hemovanadin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemovanadin . Two editors worked together to "speedy delete" it.

Same author with the same bias then as now; she tried for quite some time to use Wikipedia as a platform for cosmetic services advertising and personal vendettas.

edit: til she was banned from Wikipedia for it, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

Conversely, if a cultural touchpoint shared with millions of neighbors isn't worth writing about, what is? Wikipedia isn't a newspaper so most current events probably aren't worthy of long-term documentation. There are more bands and songs than actors and movies. WP doesn't aim to be a summarized mirror of scientific journals. And yet it contains a little bit of each of those because someone thought they were worth writing about.

I'm asking seriously:

1) What's the problem with every movie (or actor or song) having its own page? They're not all linked from the front page, so they don't pollute WP any more than the existence of some rando's blog dilutes the Internet experience of people who don't visit it.

2) If movies (or actors or songs) aren't worthy of documentation, what do you feel is?

Why is Wikipedia worse with pages for every movie ever made, though? Why would it be better without them?

The irony in the end is that most of the deletions aren't actually deleted, just a bit marked to hide it.

> Is that necessary?

No, but why delete?

Why is there no alternative to Wikipedia? There exists many wiki sites devoted to various special-interest topics, but nothing that tries to provide the kind of wide-ranging general-interest coverage that Wikipedia does. (at least that I am aware of.) It would seem that enough people are unhappy with the way Wikipedia is managed that someone would figure out a way to get something started.

https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page

I think a site that feeds me an ad for Nazi Twitter on the first page counts as 'special interest'.

Forgive me if I don't link it, but there is an alternative to the "liberal facts" presented on Wikipedia.

If you want the alt-truth about things like evolution and the Obama administration, I'm sure you can find the site with a few choice keywords. Did you know that abortion causes breast cancer?

Oops, I just vomited a little, sorry about that.

>1. An editor, usually a woman or a minority group member, writes a stub for a requested article, including references and assertion of notability.

>2. That editor leaves the project, typically because of harassment or because someone deleted one of their articles.

Well that was a wild extrapolation. Plenty of people add a stub, don't bother to finish it, and never edit again out of basic disinterest. Since Andrea is almost certainly just guessing, I'm going to guess that the stats (if stats were to be gathered) would show little or no correlation between protected status and failing to complete articles.

As for the topic of spurious deletion of stubs, I don't see the value in it, it would be nice to hear the rationale for the policy.

I think that contextualizing stub deletion as an identity ("The Deletionists") is utterly ridiculous and reads as a personal attack rather than a genuine interest in improving the quality of Wikipedia. It is clear that editors are applying the deletion policy in some fashion, so if there is a problem, it is in the policy. Maybe Wikipedia should send email nags to authors of new stubs. Maybe the policy should guard against deleting articles which are too new to survive.

Calling somebody a "deletionist" is hostile and dismissive. What happens when you're applying the policy legitimately and deleting a six year old stub with one sentence and a single unrelated/incorrect citation, and somebody comes by and accuses you of being a "deletionist". Labeling people is a good way to put them on the defense and ruin a conversation.

> Plenty of people add a stub, don't bother to finish it, and never edit again out of basic disinterest.

Why is that a problem? Suppose you write a stub and walk away. Some day I want to look up the same subject and maybe write about it. There are two paths:

1) Your stub still exists. I see your references and use that as a starting point to flesh it out.

2) Your stub was deleted. I see none of your work and start over from scratch.

On a practical level, what would the existence of your stub cost? It's a few KB of text and not directly linked from anywhere; it's not like we all find WP articles by loading a master index and starting from the top.

If you read carefully, you'll see that I'm not arguing for the deletion of stubs. I'm arguing against the creation of the "deletionist" identity. Deleting a stub article is an action. If the action of deleting stubs is making Wikipedia worse rather than better, then the policy needs to change. We don't need a campaign of shame and a witch hunt for "deletionists".

> If the action of deleting stubs is making Wikipedia worse rather than better, then the policy needs to change.

It is and it does.

> We don't need a campaign of shame and a witch hunt for "deletionists".

Given the lack of official action against what are widely perceived as abusive trolls, I think a shaming campaign is inevitable.

Watch it work so well, just like every other identitarian shame campaign.

It's not like the article is attempting to coin a term to characterize people as "deletionists". That term has been in common use describing wikipedia editors who favor more exclusionary policies for at least ten years.

Here's a Jeff Atwood piece from 2006, to cite one example. https://blog.codinghorror.com/wikipedia-inclusionists-vs-del...

The past 3 wikis of people I've read have been false; either recently vandalized or wrong for a long time. The Wikipedia admins have free reign to vandalize any article they want... But why? It's the admins who have been doing the vandalizing and citing unreputable sources. I don't understand why; have they been hacked?

First, Wikipedia admins are not chosen by the Foundation, nor employees, but are simply elected users. Once elected you stay an admin "forever". Wikipedia en has 1268 of them.

>The Wikipedia admins have free reign to vandalize any article they want...

They don't. You can of course discuss their edits, especially if you have good arguments against them. You may ultimately call for a vote on that.

If they have gone rogue, you may signal them, and they may be removed from the role.

This seems like something worth protesting about/trying to stop, but I'm not finding any sources for the "40% of Wikipedia is under threat" claim made by the headline.

The article mostly discusses a stub that was marked for deletion by one of many users who seem to pride themselves on deleting articles.

The 40% figure comes from ~2 million stub articles out of ~5.3 million total on English-language Wikipedia.

Interesting, thanks.

So they're just claiming all stubs (and no "full" articles) are in danger of deletion from these deletionists?

Unfortunately, Boing Boing loves sensationalistic headlines that turn out to be unsupported by data.

Writer Andrea James asserts that victims of deletion are often a woman or "minority group" member. She blames the deletion problem on "primarily older white male deletionists". If you look up the author you will discover she is "an American trans woman and controversial LGBT rights activist" according to her Wikipedia entry[1].

When an article deviates into social justice topics, red flags go up. First of all, how is it possible to ascertain the identity of the admins; do they have mugshots somewhere on the site? Or is she just guessing based on cultural biases displayed by the deleters?

A debate and discussion about Wikipedia is in order, but this particular article is polluted by the author's personal biases, in my judgement.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_James

> 1. An editor, usually a woman or a minority group member, writes a stub for a requested article, including references and assertion of notability.

Proof? No?

So is this true or is it just lazy writing that attempts to frame this as yet another attack on women and minorities so as to try and garner easy support?

Yeah, that was lazy on the author's part and probably wrong.

Should call it the "SJW effect", when it backfires, akin to the Streisand effect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com