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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

I tried to edit the entry for my own great grandfather, once a notable member of government and the military, to include some of his current living relatives who work in government and military jobs today, many of whom carry the same name. My father's generation was listed and I wanted to add my own generation to the tree. I though it was a basic edit to update a very minor article. I gave up after I was asked/told to present documentation. Presumably, they wanted birth certificates or military ID cards.

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It sounds like you have somewhat of a misunderstanding about what kind of content Wikipedia aims to include. It does not aim to include every fact, only those which are “notable” - that is inevitably somewhat subjective, but the idea is it doesn’t want an article on every single government and military employee - only the particularly notable ones, who are generally going to be limited to elected officials (and even then generally only national and state/provincial, with local elected officials generally only being article-worthy for major metropolises), agency heads, generals, etc. Unless these relatives of yours hold one of those very senior positions, or has some kind of media profile/etc independently of their government/military job, they probably are not noteworthy enough to mention-even if they are relatives of someone noteworthy, Wikipedia isn’t trying to be a genealogy, so genealogical information is generally only included if the ancestor/descendant is independently notable, and otherwise is generally only limited to a generation or two (which may be why your father’s generation makes the cut but not your own.)

Furthermore, the demand for documentation is important, because how do they know you are not just making stuff up? (You’d think people would never contribute blatantly invented information, but people actually have done it-some people get some kind of twisted pleasure out of it, in other cases people have done it out of mental illness.) Reliable secondary sources (so not birth certificates or military IDs, which are primary sources) also help in distinguishing what information is “encyclopaedic” from what isn’t-if reliable secondary sources aren’t interested in a topic, Wikipedia will not be either.

Wikipedia has a list. The list is out of date. I was adding to it to bring it up to date. There was never any suggestion that these people shouldn't be there. There was never any mention of removing material from the original article. As for notability, every US senator, General or head of even the most minor agency seems to have a wikipedia page these days, along with all their wives/husbands and kids. I don't see those pages being deleted when they leave office.

Every one of those pages has citations to reliable secondary sources (if they don't, you can get them deleted by referring them to AfD). If you can provide sources for the person you want to write about, a source that includes some argument for their notability, your article will survive too.

It's frustrating, some of the pages that manage to survive on WP by dint of flimsy sources that have written about them. I spent a bunch of months trying to push back on spam pages in my own field on WP and ultimately gave up. But there's a reason it's like this: it's an all-volunteer project, and they have to draw a line somewhere, and it has to be a line that's easy for (very) part-time volunteers to quickly and cheaply adjudicate. WP:RS is exactly such a line.

> Wikipedia has a list. The list is out of date. I was adding to it to bring it up to date.

If your source for these updates was basically "I'm family, trust me bro", isn't this a case of WP's verifiability for once working well?

Also, there's some extra rules around people that are still alive, not sure if it's politeness, not wanting to get sued or used for harassment but probably worth bearing in mind if you're frustrated that they won't let you add random family members.

The challenge with notability is that everyone, or at least a lot of people (and things), are notable within some community. "Celebrities"? Sure. How about senior executives of F500 companies, high school quarterbacks who are written about in local newspapers, journalists who publish regularly, tenured professors at "major" universities, authors, the most trivial political figure, etc.

A lot of people/things have some level of public visibility if you get to a sufficiently specific group--whether geographical or in terms of popular/professional interest. The system kinda sorta works but it's very inconsistent.

I have a friend and former boss who has a Wikipedia article. He has two careers in which he is about equally Notable, but the article is all about one of them, and contains not one sentence about the other. To someone who knows him, it's very weird. But to someone stumbling on the article, they don't know any better.

Of course I thought (for about 5 seconds) hey I'll edit the wiki. But I know better than to waste my time on it. It wouldn't work. There's nothing to cite. Just my personal knowledge, because I was there. His other accomplishments took place before the Web took off. Before stuff got written about everything. There's probably something in the way of sources I could track down if my life depended on it, but it doesn't.

So I left a comment on the talk page. That was probably 8 years ago, and nothing happened. I mean, even if maybe his other career wasn't quite Wikipedia-Notable, it would still make a really interesting couple of sentences given that his Wikipedia page did make the notable cut, and he was also super successful in this other field that you'd never ever guess he'd been involved in because it has zero to do with what Wikipedia thinks his main thing is.

It sounds like Wikipedia is working the way it should work here. If there are no reliable secondary sources that wrote about your boss' other career, there's nothing for Wikipedia to cover about it. The alternative, of people who believe they have firsthand knowledge about subjects just writing free-form in encyclopedia pages, obviously wouldn't work.

Sure, sure. Obviously. My frustrations with Wikipedia stem from having begun editing and delighting in it in 2001, and having ragequit circa 2006. I'm well aware that I definitively "lost" my side of that battle well over a decade ago. Just spinning a yarn.

I also gave up around 2008/9. It was such an amazing, wild west of people contributing in any which way they could, illuminating bad edits, and trying to coordinate it all among the chaos.

Now it's just solidified into maintenance and administration mode. If they allow anything wild again, they risk losing their position and every organization seeks to propagate and continue its own existence, so they don't allow anything anymore.

It's slightly funny that all the people complaining about the Wikipedia here, what they are really showing is that Wikipedia still works, and it is doing it as intended.

I struggle with how to describe it. Is it the most successful project in the history of the Internet? Probably! "Modern intellectual history"? Ew. But: maybe? We're blasé about it because we've lived with it for so long. But it's truly an amazing thing.

I'm going to say one of the most valuable creations of humanity, period. People compare it to an encyclopedia, but I had encyclopedias as a kid and wikipedia covers way more information in an order of magnitude more detail.

Even compared to say, the Library of Congress, it has 1) multiple authors per article 2) intense scrutiny over disputed information and 3) hyperlinks to primary sources

If I had to restart civilization from scratch, a copy of wikipedia would be the #1 thing I would want.

It's "working as intended" in the sense that its rules are being followed. The problem is that the rules are only there because we want Wikipedia to actually be useful as a source of knowledge, and the rules which demand removing this information have failed at this larger goal.

Agreed. Wikipedia would be much better without notability requirements, etc.

That’s how it was for the first few years, and it was glorious. Something of immense value (to inclusionists) was surely lost. The deletionists traded it all away for credit in the straight world.

many wikis with that premise have been created, Everipedia is the latest that comes to mind. of course they all have failed one way or the other. the comments seem to want something even more radical—a wiki without verifiability requirements. why that would be a very bad idea is immediately obvious.

Many, many attempts have been made to make a Wikipedia without this requirement. None have gained any traction. Perhaps the experiment has been done, and it isn't better?

Wikipedia itself was in practice a Wikipedia without this requirement for years, and it gained all of the traction before the deletionistas won their war and rewrote history. I know this because I was working in Microsoft’s Education Products Group during that time (aka Encarta) and Wikipedia completely ended us. What Wikipedia had not gained was serious credibility - i.e. professors were forbidding their students to cite it. How hard do you think we tried to use that to our PR advantage to save our product and the whole org? It didn’t make any difference.

What's the time period you're thinking about? I was somewhat intensely involved with Wikipedia back in 2007, and "deletionism" was so ingrained into the site that it was a joke to talk about it. You'd have to be telling us that Wikipedia didn't expand or improve at all in the last (does math) 15 years. Sounds like an extraordinary claim.

2001-2006, but front loaded in the first two years. Perhaps you can imagine why I would see/feel this as new people coming in and taking over a great thing. Of course Wikipedia expanded and improved astronomically in that time, but within its own constraints. If you've completely bought into the policy, then you would see that as expanding and improving, full stop, mission accomplished. It was a trade-off. Something gained, something lost. I expect that you think there is a "pick one" law at work here. I don't. I would have liked to see more aspiration to completeness, even at the expense of errors taking longer to correct. Like open source with less code review up front, vs. with code review and a lot more process. As it is, Wikipedia is still great, but how much knowledge will be lost forever? The world at large and future generations will never know that my friend, who has a Wikipedia article of his name that is for whatever reasons non-biographical (I have not kept up with the rules, at all), founded a company and created software that transformed an entire massive, critical, but very very boring industry.

You're not wrong. Be happy about what is. I'm sad about what might have been. Don't worry about it, it's part of my personality. Listened to too much Nine Inch Nails.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

Big. If I donate a couple of hard drives, will you tell your friends to let me and my friends make Wikipedia 1,000 times bigger?

More importantly, almost all of the growth, in both relative and absolute terms, occurred after the onset of deletionism.

Network effects are what made Internet great and ruined it... Wikipedia has the existing content(could be stolen), but it also has the brand recognition which makes any new players very hard to usurp it. And regular users are annoyed, but really don't change their use patterns.

What does it matter what users do? The pages we're talking about aren't on the Wikipedia at all and never will be. It's not like you're competing with them as a platform for the content; it's all yours.

Also, notice how vanishingly few give checkable examples, and when they do their example is often bad.

One of my wife's family ancestors has a Wikipedia article. They are a reasonably famous person in their niche, multiple biographies written about them - at least one of which was cited (and clearly plagiarised in one part) in the article.

There was a glaring, massive factual error in the Wikipedia article - 10 seconds with any source about him would have highlighted what the error was. They said he was X, and he was actually Y and being Y was a big part of his life. We edited it - given that every single primary source about him says he was Y (including the sources cited on the page) this should have been cut and dried. It was reverted. After a while the massive factual error was replaced with a weasel worded "there was some evidence he was Y".

Someone who clearly had no clue about the historical figure was involved in small minded, petty guarding of the article under cover of "avoiding controversy" - quite possibly agenda driven to keep him in the X categorisation. I note that even though the article is now massively improved it manages to totally avoid mentioning that he was Y.

If that is "working as intended" then Wikipedia is fundamentally broken and cannot be trusted for any information.

Incidentally i think Wikipedia is great and use it all the time.

But the industrial level "eyes closed fingers in the ears" by its fanboys whenever valid criticism is raised continues to be infuriating.

What's the article? Let's look at the specifics. Things definitely go wrong on WP!

That's reasonable for the most part. Another, probably even more common case, it that someone's professional identity and work will often be pretty well documented, referenced, and discussed--while there will often be next to nothing about them personally. In fact, I'd say that was the norm for pretty much any executive, researcher, journalist, etc.

Family members two generations down from some famous person generally aren't relevant for the article or, if they are, someone else will at some point add them to the article. Seriously: you are surprised that someone may believe you have a conflict of interest when you're making an edit that has your name in it?

No, WP specifically doesn't want birth certificates or military ID cards, which are a form of primary source. WP wants you to cite other published works (ideally a URL to another reputable source) that document the facts in question.

For military or government officials, their office or command often will have a web page noting the names of their current/former executives, COs, XOs, etc. They might also have issued a press release when a notable person joins their organization, or which quotes the person in question.

If there are zero public sources documenting where your relatives are employed or assigned, then it's arguable that these relatives are not actually notable enough to warrant mention in the WP article.

WP ia not intended to be a directory of all facts or people.

Why would they allow just anyone to edit the article? They probably could be a better process, which goes beyond the scope of Wikipedia, to verify identity but why would they not ask for this?

Because wikipedia was meant to be open. When the article was first created it had zero documentation. Someone just wrote from memory and published it. It then sat for a decade without additions. Now it cannot be touched because editing an old article draws mod attention. I guess if I cared I could hire someone to make the edit, someone with a longstanding wikipedia account. Such things do happen. I guess that is the real future of openness.

Wikipedia publishes in exquisite detail what it's meant to be; it's one of the most rigorously documented communities on the Internet. Again: if you can cite a specific topic you've had problems with, along with the time the problems happened, we can probably see whether there was abusive administration happening (that definitely does happen sometimes) or whether you were just not careful about following their process (far more common).

The complete history of most articles is right there on the wiki. You've made several comments like this, you should be able to provide multiple examples to substantiate your claims.

Following the logics of requiring an official government-issued docs, is it required for any fact written in Wikipedia, or where they draw the line?

In other words, how exactly is the "common knowledge" separated from the "controversal" one, which requires a proof to present to self-appointed guardians of the True?

> where they draw the line?

Where the king of the article hill would decide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_don%27t_need_to_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_do_need_to_cite_...

The official Wikipedia rule is that all material must be verifiable from a reliable source.

There is a whole lot of policy and debate behind that rule; for a start see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

No offence but that is shocking that someone would even ask that. The entire point for the existence of Wikipedia is anyone can contribute or edit anything.

Wayback machine capture of Wikipedia from Mar 31 2001

> Welcome to Wikipedia, a collaborative project to produce a complete encyclopedia from scratch. We started in January 2001 and already have over 13,000 articles. We want to make over 100,000, so let's get to work--anyone can edit any page--copyedit, expand an article, write a little, write a lot. See the Wikipedia FAQ for information on how to edit pages and other questions.

That was 21 years ago.

The nature of Wikipedia has evolved over time as the web has evolved over time. In fact, it followed the pattern of most large web institutions: open and freewheeling when nobody cares, consolidating and conservative as it becomes infrastructure.

> That was 21 years ago.

Somebody should tell Wikipedia. Their banner still says "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit."

And we're asking "why would they let just anyone edit a page?"?

Anyone can edit a page… but not all edits have to be accepted. The problem, as it usually is with anything open on the internet, is that a malicious user can do ridiculously more damage with less effort and time than a benevolent user can prevent or supersede. The scales are lopsided.

So it inevitably becomes that the onus falls on filtering out the crap before it hits (rather than cleaning it up afterwards)… and thus inevitably more policy, bureaucracy and requirements placed up front.

And while anyone can choose to meet these requirements, it becomes cost-prohibitive to learn and adhere for a drive-by editor, whereas it gets amortized out for long-term users. Thus it becomes open to all, yet open to few.

It's the same "everyone" as "Everyone can be President."

No, it isn't.

The web and wikipedia has surely evolved... in a very cancarous way

They wanted a secondary, publicly available source, which is the standard for sourcing on Wikipedia. It is a good thing that "facts" that aren't publicly verifiable can't be added to Wikipedia, both because it protects people's privacy, and because Wikipedia is not the place for opinion pieces.

Typically everything on wikipedia must have a source where the information comes from.

Evidently not all sources are acceptable. Government and military websites with people's names were not enough. I was asked for realworld non-internet documentation as "Those might have the same name but not be actual relatives". At that point I just gave up.

I guess you'd need a source for the relationship, which understandably might not really exist in an accessible manner....

It sounds like you were doing original research: you were collecting evidence from primary sources (like rosters on military websites) and deriving claims (WP would call them "synthetic claims") from them. But Wikipedia is a tertiary source, not a secondary one: it's the job of books, journal articles, magazine articles, newspaper stories, and the like to present original research. It makes more sense if you understand encyclopedias the way Wikipedia does: as a sort of directory or survey of secondary sources, and little more than that.

So what you do is write an article with your findings, citing your sources. Then edit wikipedia citing your article.

Yes. I mean, getting your article published somewhere is even more effective, and WP is, with good reason, jaded about citing blogs (everyone who has ever wanted to spam WP has realized that they can claim a blog they wrote is a reliable source). But yeah, that's the system working.

We have a variant of that here! People want to control the titles of their submissions, but HN doesn't generally allow editorialized titles. But it will happily allow you to submit your own blog post about any subject, with any title you choose.

Note that if you're doing that (citing something you wrote) or really even doing what the other poster is saying (editing pages about a family member) you're subject to the conflict of interest policy too and need to disclose it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest

to include some of his current living relatives who work in government and military jobs

That's a form of doxxing and generally considered to be malicious behavior across most of the internet.

Except on, for one example, Wikipedia, where including relevant information about noteworthy relatives of people with entries is totally normal provided it can be cited from a reliable source.

If these relatives are already publicly acknowledged to be working for or assigned to those organizations, there's nothing malicious or harmful about citing those already public sources.

Put this another way... If a news reporter published a story about this person, would you call that "doxxing"? Probably not... That's just what "reporting" is.

Doxxing requires malicious intent, and an attempt to cause harm to the subject by placing their personally identifying information in the path of some kind of expected public shitstorm. Unless there's reason to believe these relatives are going to suffer, then it seems like a stretch to call it doxxing.

In other words, they wanted primary sources, something they frown upon. They are fairly hypocritical.

It sounds to me like GP was asked to present documentation and assumed they wanted ID cards or birth certificates. But that doesn't make much sense to me, because an ID card wouldn't prove a familial relationship anyway, which is the fact in question.

In fact, uploading an ID card or Birth Certificate of a living person (potentially even your own?) to Wikipedia is almost certainly a violation of the Biographies of Living Persons policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...

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