In Defense of Inclusionism (2009-18)

I like the idea that the articles on Wikipedia are generally on "notable" topics or people. When I am reading an article I know that it has probably been eyed up and down by deletionists, hunting for any excuse to delete it, but they walked away unable to do so. That's a very useful signal to me!

For example, right now I can look someone up and use "has a Wikipedia page" as a rough proxy for "is well known". If everyone had Wikipedia pages, I could no longer do this.

For example, here are IMO the most salient points from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism:

> Some believe that the presence of uninformative articles damage the project's usefulness and credibility, particularly when casual visitors encounter them through Internet search engines or Wikipedia's "random page" or "recent changes."

> Articles on obscure topics, even if they are in principle verifiable, tend to be very difficult to verify. Usually, the more obscure, the harder to verify. Actually verifying such articles, or sorting out verifiable facts from exaggeration and fiction, takes a great deal of time. Not verifying them opens the door to fiction and advertising. This also leads to a de facto collapse of the "no original research policy", which is one of the fundamental Wikipedia policies. Empirically, there have been a number of hoax articles which were difficult to prove to be hoaxes but which could have easily been deleted by a sufficiently strict notability policy.

> Poorly-sourced articles can result in Citogenesis, as incorrect or unsourced information on Wiki (e.g., information that is the product of original research) is then repeated outside Wiki and eventually works its way into a publication that is normally regarded as a reliable source.

The time and effort of the Wikipedia editors; the reputation of Wikipedia in general.

The fact that it's at some point impossible to disambiguate information. If you have 50.000 pages of everyone's cat it'd be borderline impossible to find general information that is relevant to a public audience. It's the same reason I can't go to the public library and put random writings of me on a shelf, there needs to be a level of curation so that the content isn't being bogged down by what is mostly going to be noise.

The article brings up a page for each pokemon say, and if you have countless of pokemon all with similar names to other real-world stuff everyone who doesn't care about the pokemon will have to wade through links and pages of irrelevant content, it'd quickly turn into a huge digital garbage dump.

Also not to mention that Wikipedia wants to provide a reasonable level of accuracy and factfulness, and nobody can independently verify personal content or topics so niche that only one person knows what's going on.

I don't know why someone really would want wikipedia to turn into a website for in-universe fiction or people's personal content. That stuff is more suited for a self-hosted wiki.

That flag exists. It's set by deleting the article. As you note:

> in the current deletionist world, the initial article and its deletion will be preserved in history forever

So if someone wanted to present an inclusionist view of Wikipedia to those who find that content valuable, they could do so.

> But what is the cost of having them?

0. Volunteer time may be cheap, but it's not infinite. Without standards, the volume of articles could become so large it will be an impossible task to fact check and edit them all.

1. Malicious, unscrupulous, or misguided actors co-opting Wikipedia's reputation for their own purposes (e.g. Jack's snake oil has been scientifically proven to cure all disease by all these articles in fake medical journals).

2. Useless garbage in search results that you'd have to wade through. Literally thousands of high school students every year would put up pages about their bands, cartoons, and art which are of no value to anyone but themselves. Why host all that if you're just going to have to build your search to exclude it?

Several billion cat-water bowl pages are probably just an annoyance for someone.

But what would you think of a page explaining, say, all the healthy virtues of drinking diluted bleach for fighting C19 being hosted on wikipedia.org?

How do you think that's going to work out, in the first instance, when panicking people read it, and in the second, when people start treating wikipedia.org as trustworthy as their spam folder?

The same is true for the stuff I know anything about, too. But I wonder if there's an alternative interpretation of this. The article argues:

> And it’s casual users who matter. We lost the credentialed experts years ago, if we ever had them.

I can see the truth in this. But at the same time, couldn't you say that to the same extent, the more "casuals" you have editing, the worse the articles that really need an expert's oversight (like machine learning articles) are going to be?

I recently made some huge improvements to an article that was basically unreadable. Then I started looking through the history, and found that the article had been basically okay (though not great) about 8 months prior. Tracing the edits, I found that a professor at a community college had made it a semester long assignment for each student to pick a Wikipedia article to work on, in order to learn ... something. In any case, the student assigned to work on the article in question couldn't even write coherent English, let alone make high quality edits to this article. They had systematically ruined the article with a new account over about 4-5 months, with no oversight, and none of their commits were reverted by any editor.

So I find it rather hard to say for certain that what we need are "more" editors, if those editors are largely going to be casual editors. As an expert (in a small number of fields), I don't (usually) edit Wikipedia for two reasons:

1. The starting quality of most of the articles I would work is so abysmally bad that I'd honestly rather tell the students I work with to just totally ignore Wikipedia as a way of learning about stuff in my field. Making two or three articles passable would not resolve that fundamental problem. (The problem is that the quality of an article not overseen by a very good editor is at best going to approach an average quality essay by a college student - in other words, about a 2 out of 5.)

2. I don't mind strict editing rules (see above), in fact I think they may often be necessary. What I've encountered when trying to edit Wikipedia, however, is that long-time editors know how to use and distort the rules to their own advantage. This doesn't mean the rules are misguided, necessarily, it just means that Wikipedia's culture is too insular and the top editors tend to have their own way with things.

What exactly does policing for spam and vandalism consist of? There are a number of automated tools already deployed on wikipedia that get improved over time for detecting particular types of spam and vandalism. The use of anonymous accounts, in particular, make it hard to do any interesting spam at scale. It seems to me that the larger wikipedia is, paradoxically, the easier it will be to detect patterns of spam, especially out on the tail.

As for "No Original Research", that's probably the principle of wikipedia that I'm most skeptical of; and really, it isn't respected, as wikipedia has become such an important secondary source. I think it's useful as a guiding principle, in that you don't want people using wikipedia as a platform to advance their alternative theory of gravity, but for the most part the harm is small to allow us to push the envelope a little bit.

This is in fact being proposed at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum#Proposal_tow... by a prominent Wikidatan. (Edit: follow up at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikilambda .) However generating sensible articles would require expanding the current Wikidata model, and this is something that should happen gradually and be managed by the WD community itself, not at a separate project. The whole pretty-printing-in-natural-language part is the most speculative by far, and incubating it separately makes more sense.

It's worth noting that Wikidata itself is not "deletionist" other than as implied by verifiability- and sourcing-requirements. Its model is far more general and far more "inclusionist" than even the most permissive visions for Wikipedia.

This feels like a gross misreading of the facts.

Wiktionary is separate from Wikipedia because its work product is fundamentally different -- it's a dictionary, not an encylopedia. Wikipedia has a lot of articles about things that aren't words, and Wiktionary has a lot of pages for words that wouldn't make sense to write an encyclopedia article about.

Wikidata, meanwhile, is only about raw data. Which is a part of an encyclopedia, but far from all of it. (How would you write an article about the history of Rome using only data?)

> But, let's be honest, the writing was on the wall when Esperanza [1] was dissolved.

This, too, is a gross misstatement of the facts.

Esperanza was dissolved because it was becoming a cabal. It started as a social group, but rapidly grew into its own organization, with its own decision-making processes and elected officials separate from those of Wikipedia. There was widespread agreement, even from Esperanza's founder, that the organization was no longer fulfilling its purpose, and an effort to reform it before it was shut down.

There's a decent summary at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

That said, it's pretty clear that there are more than a few Wikipedia admins who seem to have embraced deletionism for topics that aren't near and dear to them personally and/or which poke at whatever their particular political hot buttons are.

The sole time that Reddit was in danger was when their front page was blacked out over the moderator rebellion. Luckily for them, Voat's servers completely died under the load. Then Reddit came back online, and the rest was history.

I would imagine your questions have straightforward answers along those lines. No one switches because inertia, not quality.

In general, a new thing has to be fundamentally different in some way. It's rare that an internet product is out-competed by someone else doing literally the same thing. Even Reddit was fundamentally different from digg. They were both link aggregators, but that's about where the similarities stopped.

The invasion of policy-driven jerks seems like a good counterargument; it's an anti-economy of scale, since smaller websites have less of the problem.

edit: Arguing about scale also kind of ignores that there's a good space between the scope of the website being "everything" and having a website dedicated to the IDW "Sniffles the Mouse" comics. IMDB is well-respected, TVTropes has been successful with a very different culture from IMDB, the Arch Linux Wiki has a reputation for being useful even if you aren't technically using Arch, and, as we've already proven, Wikia has pretty much made a business out of this.