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Comment by thriftwy | Hacker News Reader

Here, I have a Venn diagram to illustrate a point:

https://www.meta-chart.com/share/how-wikipedia-deletionism-w...

Two important takeaways are: A lot of stuff on Wikipedia just isn't encyclopedic. For example, there's a lot of sports trivia about obscure teams and local leagues. Such data deserves structured storage and not Wikipedia, and I just don't feel "2013 Richmond Raiders season" is more important than any single matematician who worked with Erdős.

Second takeaway, a whole world of topics is just not ever noted by Wikipedia. For examples, you can have whole branches of local music scenes ineligible for note because every single artist fails to "be mentioned in a paper made of paper" (in 2010s, seriously) or "sell 3k discs made of plastic and foil" (again, this is in 2010s).

If there's some kind of consistent policy I definitely don't see the value of it.

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The justification for the policy I have heard is that people should be able easily verify the information.

If it's in the New York Times you can probably believe that it's not been created to game Wikipedia, the same cant be said for a random blog.

I regularly see people complain about this without mentioning how they would solve this problem.

The problem isn't the New York Times though. If someone has been profiled or otherwise written about repeatedly in the NYT, they're probably notable at some level. The issue is mentions in obscure books and local newspapers tend to trump even a significant online presence.

I'm not sure what the best answer is either. The closest I've seen is to overlay a more inclusionist Wikipedia with some sort of crowdsourced reputation/quality moderation system. That can be gamed too of course but something along those lines may be the best approach.

Most of papers made of paper are absolutely not available for verification. Ditto for research articles behind paywall or just cited as paper sources. You could invent dozens of such credible sources with no chances for anybody to ever check.

I can understand "we could not verify this so we are deleting this article", but not "we speedy deleted this article without checking anything". The latter has no excuses except for obvious commercial spam.

The correlation between notability and verifiability certainly starts to break down quickly once you get past easily accessible, well-known, and well-regarded sources. No one is going to chase down paper copies of obscure magazines, newspapers, or out-of-print books to verify some statement, especially if it's not highly questionable for some reason. The system does kinda work because most people aren't outright inventing fake references to game the system.

What would be your criteria for the system failing to work?

What can go visibly wrong if Wikipedia would cover different subset of obscure topics than it does currently?

We're not talking about faking facts in well-visited articles, since a) that's not what is being discussed, and b) that has been done anyway, getting into news multiple times.

To me, "failing to work" would mean not really usable across a wide range of domains. I can find plenty to fault with Wikipedia including the fact that it tilts further in the deletionist direction than would be my personal choice. A failure to include a lot more articles on relatively obscure topics may be a shortcoming but it probably doesn't, at the end of the day, make Wikipedia a lot less useful for the typical person.

Is Wikipedia useful today? Absolutely.

Does deletionism sometimes leads to embarrassing results? As witnessed, it does.

Would less deletionism lead to Wikipedia becoming "not really usable across a wide range of domains"? I can't see how it would, neither could you.

So I would argue that Wikipedia deletion policy is considerably suboptimal.

Wikipedia is like a subgraph of the internet. Are there good reasons for certain sites to be blocked on the net? Yes? Should I just be allowed to call you a stupid plucktwit as if I was f'in Linus Torvalds (just for illustration purposes (psyched, I'm really enjoying this(I'm not even making the turn around to illustrate the analogy to Wikipedia any further)))?

I guess deletion also serves to keep editors in check, if they don't meet quality standards. It's simply more difficult to delete a deletion-privileged user who has also a number of contributions under the belt. This is similar to police corruption, or shirky's principle.

No, there are no good reasons for sites to be blocked on the net.

Also no reason for valid articles to be deleted from Wikipedia.

I am against corruption and this is awful. Nobody should be reasoning this.

if you try to censor the censors you can only loose. corolarily, it would be nice if there were no censors.

Why does HN have a downvote button (for prolific users with karma>500, anyways? (and why doesn't facebook?)).

I don't know (do you?) , and btw, HN as social community is barely functioning. Just look at all the people with throwaway accounts, and the dang in shining armour.

For sorting comments on usefulness. Of 10 toplevel replies to a post, which should be displayed first? The highest-voted/most-recent one. Also spam.

spam, is exactly the problem?

Isn't chasing down obscure sources what researchers do? Out of print books can often be found in libraries. College libraries also often have subscriptions allowing paywalls to be bypassed.

It's unlikely most people would do these things just for fun, but allowing citations that can be verified using ordinary research methods seems pretty reasonable.

You seem to think that the (speedy) deletion criteria are much more liberal than they actually are. In fact, they are very narrow, so that only "obvious commercial spam" or otherwise obviously inappropriate articles get deleted in this way.

"We could not verify this fact" is not a valid reason for deletion, let alone speedy deletion. The requirement is verifiability (it must be possible to verify this fact using reliable sources), not verification (it's OK if the sources are not immediately available).

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Db-band

They don't just speedy delete articles about music groups, they have a dedicated template for it. As per CSD A7.

I don't see why a page about music group would be "obviously inappropriate". Maybe you will care to explain?

Because there is usually no or low encyclopedic content, on the one hand, Discogs already exists for that, and because every fan after comming home from a concert checking wikipedia will have the genius idea to set a memorial for the idol, amounting to scribling "Metallica" in a stall.

I know, because I've done both.

You lost me here. I consider any art sacred. I don't see why would not there be an article for any artist that recorded anything.

How about "2013 Richmond Raiders season"? Apparently this is more encyclopedic? There are no specialized sites for this?

I would say you did not carry your point across.

I guess that's a complex topic to answer. Assume that the time and space complexity of maintanance increases with each article, because not every article is perfect. Then you need a good reason to increase that complexity.

> How about "2013 Richmond Raiders season"? Apparently this is more encyclopedic? There are no specialized sites for this?

No I'm not, I just choose to ignore sportsfandom.

That doesn't sound like a complete argument. How big is this maintenance increase? Does it get evened out by influx of new editors?

You choose to ignore sportsfandom, but apparently it gets out of jail free card on Wikipedia. Is it a good thing? Why? Where's the motivation? Who decided that?

> Does it get evened out by influx of new editors?

no it does not. These artist articles are created in subpar condition and left to rot, most of the creators not coming back, in the extreme case but often enough. There's certainly a bunch of obscure artists, say death metal bands ... and on the other hand my local low league team doesn't have a page. The proportions you are comparing are quite different.

> Where's the motivation? Who decided that?

there's a thing or two to say about comercialization, I'll give you that.

CSD A7 requires that there is no claim of significance. This is an incredibly low standard (much lower than notability) and does not have to be supported by a source. Basically, if there is anything written in the article that suggests the band may be significant, A7 is ruled out.

Notability and related policies kinda, sorta, maybe work on Wikipedia relative to a total free-for-all but they fall down if you start squinting hard at them. Pretty much everything is notable at some level if you get local enough in either geography or subject matter.

And, as you suggest, the fact that the high school quarterback or a local diner got written up in some local newspaper that has managed not to go out of business yet doesn't make them more notable in any important sense than, say, pretty much any scientist with a tenured position at a major university. (Or someone who is well known in open source circles or a senior executive in a major company or ...)

I'm not sure what the best answer is. We pretty much know that anything goes doesn't really work (see Google Knol). But the current system on Wikipedia is pretty flawed as well.

It seems to boil down to opinion. To an extent it has to. Though even when there's dozens of citations possible or articles on paper, and verifiable, entries can go because of an admin opinion. (I've no doubt this isn't the policy, but it sure seems like it sometimes. The one time I started to read into it I gave up.)

Plenty that really doesn't seem to pass the sniff test manages to stick around. Though I'd prefer too many edge cases than too few. There's already a mechanism to mark pages with a caveat for needing cleanup or expansion after all.

>It seems to boil down to opinion. To an extent it has to.

There are certainly plenty of cases that would seem to be at one extreme or the other. National political figures, professional sports teams, etc. etc. are clearly notable. The random person whose name is only visible on the Internet on their own website probably not.

But in between those poles are published but not well-known books, minor league baseball players, little-seen low-budget movies, random board games, amateur bands etc.

Whether, for example, every book that has ever been published could potentially have its own Wikipedia article is ultimately an opinion/philosophy about whether there should be some limits on content that's just very obscure on Wikipedia even if it's theoretically verifiable to at least some degree.

I just din't see any value in such limits. Do you? As long as article is well-written and not a self-promotion, it should be in.

Isn't it mutual and hence the other way around? Mathematicians don't seem to care much for wikipedia, sceners likewise. While sports fans might see editing, well, as a game.

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