Comment by foxpurple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foxpurple | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Editing an existing page is usually pretty easy and conflict free. Creating a new page is close to impossible and strictly guarded.

It’s almost not worth trying for a beginner because you will almost certainly be rejected. The moderators require multiple approved sources of information for a page to be created. These pages must be reputable sources (IE not blog posts, forum posts, or other wikis), and must not have any kind of commercial link to the subject. So if you create a page about a product and you state that it has feature X, you can not use the companies own page that talks about having X as a reference.

So basically you can’t make a page about something until a major news website writes about it or you can reference it in some formal study.

I tried to create a few pages. One of them being about a file format and found that I could not use the companies website with the PDF describing the spec as a reference for the format because there is a commercial link between the file format and the source linked.

This is so painfully true. I've tried to submit two articles so far to AfC (articles for creation) and both were rejected. It's puzzling to me because I often see extremely low quality articles (with just one sentence, for example), published onto mainspace.

Oh interesting. I've started editing a bit on Wikipedia recently, and seems like there are a lot of potential articles to improve upon. The deletionism issue reminds me of this article https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism

I have just come to accept this is how it is and unless you are a wiki power user who can just directly create a page, don’t bother and let someone else create it because you are wasting your time. I find it funny that articles like the one for GitLab had to fight off the wiki mods who wanted to remove it for not being notable.

The worst part is how Wikipedia does not have a logical user introduction flow. They have an insane amount of rules and process but they will very quickly drop a brand new user in to a text box and make it look like you simply type in some stuff and the page will be created.

They need some kind of reputation system to ramp up users to greater and greater feature sets like stack overflow has rather than pretending a brand new or unauthenticated user can just create a page.

I just discovered that we both may have been wrong.

Looks like you can skip the AfC review process entirely and this is given the go-ahead by Wikipedia (it's not frowned upon).

Basically, you have to create a Draft-namespace article (for example, Draft:Rust).

Then, once you have auto confirmed privileges (10 edits and 4 days account age), you can move the page namespace from the Draft namespace to the (Article) namespace...

... and that should create the article. Hmm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com