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Comment by owyn | Hacker News Reader

You could always create an esoteric languages wiki of your own if you were all fired up about it (I work at wikia, and that's the service we provide, we have 170,000 wikis on various subjects, using the same software! Founded by the same guy!)

But that's not really the point here. It's just because it's wikipedia that everyone gets all weird about it. The information is out there, I don't see why it's so important that every esoteric project have a wikipedia.org page. It's not supposed to be a compendium of ALL human knowledge, it's an encyclopedia of generally useful knowledge. There has to be SOME criteria for excluding stuff. There's already a problem with wikipedia containing way too many pages about nerd topics and not enough information about the rest of the world.

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It's not supposed to be a compendium of ALL human knowledge

...:

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. —Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds. Slashdot, 2004. http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/07/28/1351230/Wikipe...

The focus is changing, 2011:

“It’s about diversifying the community. At the moment we’re really male, geek orientated, which is great, but there are lots of editors that we don’t get who are geeks, but not tech geeks. So they may be real experts in, say, ancient Chinese poetry but if they go to try to edit Wikipedia, then they find it too intimidating and we lose them and that’s just silly."

I think this whole explosion of whatever-it-is-itis is a perfect example of that.

I'm trying to figure out what that quote has to do with anything brought up in this thread.

It is about whether minority viewpoints get a fair shake on Wikipedia.

As it turns out, no.

And it turns out minority means "outside the male, machismo-dominated world of the alpha techno-geek."

It also turns out that even esoteric technogeekery is outside the tiny circle.

And it only takes one alphageek to make it so.

This is an organizational problem with Wikipedia, not just an isolated incident.

Oh yeah, that's a great point!

Hm? It was just a counterpoint to your quote.

I'm just saying, wikipedia most likely can't and probably shouldn't contain an article about everything. It's just not possible, nor desirable, although it makes a good quote. It seems like deleting useless crap is one approach to that, and encouraging editors to contribute more to non-nerd-lore topics is another approach.

It was just a counterpoint to your quote

In what way?

encouraging editors to contribute more to non-nerd-lore topics

Surprise! Deleting Star Wars articles doesn't create more content for the article about the large-tailed antshrike.

And guess what? I don't even like Star Wars, and I think the lack of information on, you know, real stuff (in contrast to "nerd-lore topics") is disheartening. So lay off with the kind of presumptions you're throwing around in these comments.

I realize deleting one thing does not create a different thing.

I agree it was more of a tangential quote and not a direct counter, but I was trying to point out that some of this "deletionism" is probably due to a recognition that not everything is being covered equally, and it might be nice to prune the leaves from time to time to encourage growth in new directions. Or something like that. Also, I'm not trying to speak for anyone else but myself, everything I said was just my own musing about the topic. However, I do have a feeling that if the first 10 years of wikipedia was represented by your quote, the next 10 years might be represented by mine. The goal seems to be growing up and encouraging people, which seems like a good idea, considering all the rage generated by this topic. If it can't contain everything then what it does NOT contain is going to be a deliberate choice by the community, and this whole thread seems to be dominated by one side of the argument so I thought I'd throw in a tangent. Thanks for the thoughtful comments though, and I should probably have put more thought into my own comments, I was just commenting in the spur of the moment.

I do have a feeling that if the first 10 years of wikipedia was represented by your quote, the next 10 years might be represented by mine.

My quote was all-encompassing. The attitude in it eclipses the attitude in your quote.

You have won the internets today sir. It's true, my attitude has been truly eclipsed today, and my quote crushed.

Let me present the spoils of battle to the victor... I will immediately start writing a program that will recursively search wikipedia, perform a google search and then feed those results BACK into wikipedia automatically. Then it will surely be all-encompassing, no? Even better, version 2.0 will automatically categorize that knowledge and as a side effect I will have created Artificial Intelligence. No thanks necessary!

And I hereby swear to never again think that an encyclopedia written and maintained by humans should have a breadth of topics organized at a scale that makes sense to other humans, that's deletionist wrongthought!

(I do apologize for the sarcasm, but seriously not really)

You'd do well to comprehend what I've written. By saying "my attitude has been truly eclipsed today", you're framing what I've written as a petty attack on you, which it was not.

Striving for "the sum of all human knowledge" necessarily implies a compendium that includes "ancient Chinese poetry" written by a diversified community with editors who are "not tech geeks".

My point is that you tried to retort with a completely sideways quote as if it was at odds with the one I used, when it's not. If you've achieved the sum of all human knowledge or are working towards it, you've already picked up or are continuing to pick up along the way the types highlighted in the quote you used. It's not taking a new direction, because you were already traveling in all directions.

Dipshit. (That's a petty attack.)

...it might be nice to prune the leaves from time to time to encourage growth in new directions

Could you explain the mechanism by which that would work?

Do you expect that the person contributing articles about Star Wars will, after his article on Boba Fett's brother in law is deleted, decided to write an article about critical feminist post-industrialist theory?

Looks like I really ran into a buzzsaw here. Sorry for not presenting a magical unicorn for you on demand.

Sure, maybe in 10 years after they grow up and develop some interests besides Star Wars, that person might have something more useful to contribute.

Sorry for not presenting a magical unicorn for you on demand.

You're suggesting that this kind of deletionism is constructive in the long run. The onus is on you here.

Its not a counterpoint. Unless you're trying to pass off that new editor intimidation is caused by too many articles.

Heres a tip: I'm not an editor anymore and it didn't have anything to do with intimidation from the size of wikipeida, it had to do with intimidation with the huge stack of wikipieda policies I was going to have to master to try and navigate around the busybodies running the place just to fix up some articles.

Fine, jeez. I should have found a better quote, maybe. I spent 10 seconds grabbing a quote from an article written two weeks ago about this subject, because I think it's related. And it's NOT the concrete number of articles, it's about encouraging more and different types of contributors besides the policy lawyers. I was TRYING to say the same thing you are saying, and all the rest of this just shows I have a lot to learn about the internals of wikipedia (I know nothing about how they work, really)

You have a funny definition of problem. "This base of information is too useful and too widely applicable! It's only supposed to contain generally useful knowledge!"

In all honesty, do you think allowing something with Nemerle's level of notability would be bad for Wikipedia? Is it somehow crowding out articles about these "other parts of the world" you mention that would otherwise exist?

It's just an encyclopedia, not a replacement for the internet. That's all I'm trying to say. I've never heard of nemerle, and I'm not a wikipedia editor, so I have no opinion about it's notoriety. In general, the categorization of knowledge is a hard problem, and a lot of people prefer to spend spend time organizing things rather than writing new content, and this just seems like one of those examples.

Not anymore. It is no longer "just an encyclopedia" and yes for many things it is very close to being the "replacement for the internet". What with spam and ads cluttering the web up. I think that precisely was the reason for the uproar.

I do not belong to any of the language communities involved, and neither do I depend on those languages for my day to day work. But languages interest me, though I am not a PL person. That is why Wikipedia is an important resource for me to come in contact with these languages. Yes, the content might exist on other parts of the web, but here it has already been collected under one umbrella. The quality on average is good, the site is speedy and without distracting cruft.

So of course that is one of the first resource I will turn to, and I have often been plentifully rewarded. Google is not the internet, neither is Wikipedia. Nevertheless if I want to search for something I will go to Google and if I want to browse something I will go to Wikipedia.

So, what these deletions mean to me is someone is destroying the value that Wikipedia has for me. I am sure many people feel the same way and hence the outrage.

It doesn't seem like that to me. Organization creates sense out of chaos. Deleting useful information just destroys things. Categorizing and organizing knowledge are hard and important problems, but going Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is not a good answer to those problems.

Personally, I really think Wikipedia has developed a culture of fetishism around the guidelines that violates their spirit (e.g. ignore all rules) where the wikilawyers chase away the real contributors — and I don't like the "take it to Wikia" suggestion because it just creates a financial incentive for Wikimedia to ignore the problem.

How does deleting nerd topics help you produce more information about the rest of the world?

And, if you have 2nd class citizens riding in the back of the wikipedia bus via wikia, i fail to see how interlinking them into the main Wikipedia makes things worse in any way shape or form.

Why is it "way too many"? Seriously, that implies that some harm is being done. What harm?

It's not harmful, just silly. There are N articles about star wars and M articles about africa. When N > M to a ridiculous level, I'm okay with pruning stuff. I've never made a single edit to wikipedia though. Looks like I'm encountering some nerd rage.

Pruning articles about Star Wars doesn't actually improve the number (or quality) of articles about Africa. Deleting Star Wars articles won't make the contributors suddenly interested in writing articles about Africa instead.

Otherwise put:

1. Articles are not substitutable goods.

2. The supply of articles is not a zero sum game.

> Deleting Star Wars articles won't make the contributors suddenly interested in writing articles about Africa instead.

If anything, the opposite happens. Contributors first come for special interests. Once welcomed into the community, they will stick around and their contributions broaden in scope. Was the interest that sparked their involvement Elizabethan drama or Star Wars? Who cares.

It's rare that I can't find some article about the "rest of the world" on Wikipedia that I'm looking for. What part of the world have I been overlooking?

I realize your question was mostly flippant and not directed at me, but to answer the question seriously:

The English Wikipedia is amazing, but it's incredibly ethnocentric in its coverage. There're a lot of red links here, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_articles_by_.... Unfortunately, when you are looking for information that's not something the average native English-speaking editor has knowledge of, and you are able to find some information, sometimes those writing it have a vested interest in the topic at hand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_supremacy is a minor example.

Yep, nail+head. Sounds like this is going to be a big institutional focus for the next couple of years as well...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/8292978/Wiki...

Somethingawful even made a game out of it, the results of which were quoted in that article:

For example, the article on "Women's suffrage" is around the same length as the "List of fictional gynoids and female cyborgs", and Shakespeare's Henry VIII is given as much attention as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

As long as the articles on Women's Suffrage and Henry VIII are of appropriate length and depth, I don't see how this is a problem. Is this a contest or something?

There is one: http://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page

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