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Comment by DanielStraight | Hacker News Reader

It never ceases to amaze how little Wikipedia understands Wikipedia. The purpose of Wikipedia to the end user (at least from my own personal experience and how I've seen other people use it) is to be able look up anything of any importance and get a quick overview of it.

Wikipedia will happily include every obscure city, animal and flower species on Earth (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnan...), but will try to delete articles on bloggers and singers that are very well known within their niche.

I don't get it. Adding additional pages to Wikipedia does very little to reduce its value and plenty to increase its value (always coming up first in Google to give a basic overview). No one is going to read or print the whole thing anyway. Whether it's 3.3 million or 13.3 million articles doesn't seem to make a difference.

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The standards for articles on bloggers and singers have to be high, because there's a huge number of bloggers and singers out there trying to promote themselves by writing on wikipedia about how awesome they are. Since nobody has the time or the inclination to police the article on Joe Blogg's Blog when it claims that "this is the awesomest blog on Earth", wikipedia tries to limit the number of articles on subjects where the article's editors are likely to have a strongly vested interest in the subject of the article.

Another reason: every obscure animal and flower species on Earth has been around for millions of years, and most of them will (I hope) be around in another million years. Towns usually have lives measured in centuries. The average blog will be forgotten (even by its author) in a few years.

The standards for articles on bloggers and singers have to be high

If they're not high quality, said famous people are likely to sue or otherwise cause hassle for Wikipedia. That's something a rare flower is not likely to do.

I've never heard of that ever happening, and I doubt it's a serious concern for them (for starters, they don't have enough money to be worth suing).

The closest it's ever come was this incident:

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

where some guy's article stated for years that he was a suspect in the Kennedy assassination. He never tried to sue wikipedia, though he did complain a lot.

Incidentally, though, this shows another reason why wikipedia articles on borderline-notable people are bad: the fewer people look at an article the more likely it is that crazy non-facts will persist in the article.

You clearly have never seen the OTRS queue if you think Seigenthaler is the closest to a suit. There have been over a handful of cases (against the WMF or Wikipedia editors themselves) and some even received media coverage, though Bauer [1] is the one that comes to mind at the moment but it certainly isn't the only one. [2]

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/dumb-idea-su...

[2] http://www.citmedialaw.org/threats/american-academy-anti-agi...

It appears to amaze you that Wikipedia doesn't understand how you understand Wikipedia. There are many hundreds of thousands of words of discussion about the WP notability criteria, which you'll never bother to read, but which fairly convincingly refute the notion that WP is just making a casual mistake here.

There are many hundreds of thousands of words of discussion about the WP notability criteria, and at least half of them are about everything that's wrong about WP notability criteria. It's not a casual mistake in the slightest--it's a mistake, but it's not casual. It's a perniciously systemic mistake rooted in a dysfunctional culture more interested in process than product.

The difference is that it's easy to look primary source material for obscure cities, animals and flowers. But not for some random guy who blogs.

While I don't agree with some of the policies on the English Wikipedia, you also have to consider that having articles about anything incurs a long-term maintenance cost on the project. This especially true when the articles are about living persons or controversial subjects.

People are always complaining about Wikipedia because some obscure subject they personally care about didn't make the cut. Meanwhile there are literally millions of very useful encyclopedia articles on topics that unquestionably belong in an encyclopedia.

It's that sort of content that Wikipedia mainly caters to.

> "unquestionably belong in an encyclopedia"

This is the problem. Wikipedia takes its lead from encyclopedias, but it's not an encyclopedia, because it's fundamentally different. It doesn't have the same space constraints, it isn't written in the same way, it isn't referenced in the same way, etc.

"Does this article feel like it belongs in an 18th century concept of an encyclopedia" kind of test for inclusion or deletion in Wikipedia just seems wrong-headed to me.

It's not fundamentally different. Wikipedia is explicitly like traditional encyclopedias in that it's not a primary source, and that it only wants articles about things which can be reliable cited in multiple primary sources.

Articles about random Internet personalities or some garage band are thus inherently not in the scope of the project, until they become more notable.

Wikipedia set out to be an encyclopaedia, not a collection of random facts. Complaining that wikipedia isn't a collection of random facts is like complaining that vi isn't Nethack. There's no reason why it couldn't be, but it isn't, and the people maintaining it don't want it to be, so that's that.

I've never understood why those who do want wikipedia to be wiki-random-non-notable-factia don't just start wiki-random-non-notable-factia. I predict it will be fairly unmaintainable, but I'm totally keen to be proven wrong.

The textual content and most of the image content is all licensed under licenses that allow you to download a copy and put it on your own server. I have a copy of English, Spanish, and Portuguese Wikipedias (text only!) in a pendrive on my desk. There's a conveniently downloadable textual tarball. Furthermore, you can even follow Recent Changes to keep things updated. And there are legit companies like Answers.com that actually do this.

I suggest that you start an "expanded Wikipedia" project with more inclusionist criteria. I'll be happy to contribute, although I'm pretty happy with the English Wikipedia's notability policy. I'm sure thousands of other people will be too, especially if the result is any good.

Jimmy Wales already did something like this, by the way.

There's no shortage of source material on lots of topics deemed "non-notable", especially when the people deeming those topics "non-notable" are people who know next to nothing about the subject itself, or are too bound by process and policy to think about doing the right thing for the project.

I've said this before, but if Wikipedia ever fails, it will be because of their tendency to delete articles that other people find relevant; a competitor that doesn't insult its users by deleting their articles capriciously (and that includes a decent search function) would actually have a chance at the throne.

It's not just the immediate impact of deletion either. I don't bother trying to add to Wikipedia anymore, because I know if I can't meet some ill-defined criteria of notability within about 5 minutes, the article will be gone. Wikipedia really does not seem to do very much to encourage involvement, especially when it comes to adding to the site.

I haven't really found that, and I've added hundreds of articles. I think one of my articles has ever been deleted (on an internet meme), and two or three others were nominated for deletion but consensus was to keep them. If you write an article in a neutral tone that sounds like an encyclopedia article, with good sources that you cite to back up the statements it makes, it'll rarely run into problems.

If you write articles purely in certain controversial areas, like recent internet memes, I can see running into a lot of problems. But the vast majority of areas don't really have any rampant deletion. I've written articles on mathematical formulas, on prominent computer scientists, on important physics books, on 18th-century politicians, on famous paintings, on well-known children's toys, and on varieties of cheese, among other things, and never gotten any problems with any of them.

Isn't this just the internet in general?

Isn't there a syndrome that describes people who try to exert as much control/authority over a small but unimportant aspect of life?

I don't know what it's called, but many Wikipedia editors clearly have it. Here's a great example - apparently there are schools of thought amongst these guys, the most popular being "Deletionist". That's right: people who believe Wikipedia is too big and needs to be pared down. Makes zero sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Orangemike

I once saw a guy go into a juice bar that sells 12 and 16 ounce smoothies and ask for a 14 ounce smoothie.

Wikipedia has the answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_retentive

It's a question of whether you want a well manicured arboretum or a wild forest filled with it's share of beautiful trees but also lots of brambles and poison oak. Wikipedia is a garden. If you want the forest, there is Google. Adding additional pages to Wikipedia might not increase its value. Someone has to maintain those new pages, keep them updated, and remove the dated and biased crap that can accumulate in Wikipedia's less visited corners.

I am tempted to delete the article on my home town and in the discussion page put non-notable city doesn't meet inclusion criteria as the reason.

Go ahead. You can't "delete" an article (you're not an admin), but if you want to see a speedy-close in action, nominate your home town for Articles for Deletion (AfD). Nobody's going to humor your argument about consistency between Yegge and an actual town; they'll just kill the AfD and get on with their lives.

Well said.

Gatekeepers focus on the gate. The garden it keeps? Not so interesting.

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