Deletionpedia: Rescuing articles from Wikipedia's deletionism | Hacker News Reader

Deletionpedia: Rescuing articles from Wikipedia's deletionism

deletionpedia.org

283 pointsDerekBickerton240 comments

I can understand why wiki articles get deleted. What I cannot understand is why their edit history is also deleted. If part of an article is deleted, one can still find it in the article history. But if the article is deleted entirely, there is no way to check what used to be there.

The history isn't removed, but its only visible to Wikipedia admins.

Factually accurate, but not any better for the public.

Do you think an admin, with some programming knowledge, could write a program to scrape all of the deleted pages on Wikipedia and store them in some public archive for people to view?

I'm sure it goes against their terms of service, but it would be really great for getting rid of censorship.

Btw. I was asking this in case deletionpedia hadn't managed to copy all of the articles.

See some of the other comments here, there's actually a procedure to request deleted pages (that are otherwise not problematic).

The trickiness comes from the deleted articles that really ought to stay dead – things like copyright infringement, doxxing, etc. Were I an admin, I'd be loath to cast the net too wide when resurfacing those removed pages.

That's the reason, I'm sure, even Deletionpedia has a removal process: https://deletionpedia.org/en/Deletionpedia.org:Removal_reque...

That is even more damning - it does not even allow the "saving storage space" excuse.

Do note that there's backups/dumps at approximately monthly intervals, too, that could have helped.

"Saving storage space" has literally nothing to do with any of Wikipedia's policies. If you thought that's why articles got deleted, you don't understand the policy, and Chesterton's Fence controls.

I know what Chesterton's Fence means, but wish you would elaborate a little on how it relates to the policy.

The rationale for deleting articles on Wikipedia has nothing to do with saving storage space, as I just said. Your comment implies that they do; in fact, you essentially argue that losing the "save space" excuse is fatal to the policy. You need to understand those policies before you can plausibly critique them. You evidently don't, and your critique is consequently implausible.

I read their comment differently. I think they were saying the admins can’t even use the excuse that any specific deletions or deletions generally are necessary to save space, because deleted items are not erased completely, but are still available to admins.

So why don't you explain what they do mean instead of these mysterious repetitions of "you don't understand" and references to concepts (Chesterton's Fence) that aren't obviously applicable to what's being discussed.

I'm not sure what's tricky to understand about this: you have to understand why the fence was put up in the first place before you can safely knock it down. That's it; that's the whole fence. If you want to understand Wikipedia's policies, go read them. They're extensively documented. You can't just make up what you think the rationales for these policies are, knock those false rationales down, and claim you've made any kind of actual argument; you're literally just arguing with yourself.

> The rationale for deleting articles on Wikipedia has nothing to do with saving storage space, as I just said. Your comment implies that they do;

I assume by "your comment", you mean mine. If so, it does not imply that that was the rationale - in fact, by calling it an excuse, and not a rationale, it implies the opposite - that the real reason is different, and storage space just a (possible) cover.

Because once you remove the storage space excuse, all that remains (besides doxing, copyright, and various legal reasons, which Deletionpedia shows are a small minority of all deleted articles) are various rationalizations on why readers should be kept in the dark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Why_we_ha... explains their reasons (edit: for soft-deleting articles, not for inaccessible history).

That's an answer to an entirely different question. It explains why only 'notable' things get articles, not why deleted articles are only accessible to admins. Perhaps you meant to link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Viewing_of_deleted_a... ?

I've read that, and their arguments are wanting. The most convincing is the doxing/legal reasons rationale. What is not convincing is using that rationale to hide the vast majority of articles that were not deleted for those reasons.

The other argument offered was "then what's the difference between a deleted and not deleted article", which is nonsense. By that logic, there is also no difference between deleting some text in an article, and leaving it in, since in both cases it is still accessible in revision history.

Finally there was the "would encourage trolls since their trolling would remain in history", but again, the same argument applies to revision history of non-deleted articles.

Yeah, I misunderstood.

So why don't you contribute something meaningful to the conversation then, instead of vague-hn'ing?

The vast majority of articles that get deleted are speedy deleted. This can be due to things like obvious vandalism (things like teenagers putting swearwords etc.) , articles about random people that are really just a breach of privacy and not helping anyone, strange conspiracy theories, advertising, spam, self-aggrandizement, copyright violations, etc. In short: Things that don't belong in an encyclopedia. This is why the history is normally hidden as well. [1]

The articles that get any sort of discussion at all are the edge cases where a single patroller by themselves can't make up their mind. And due to the nature of being edge cases, they can indeed attract quite some discussion!

If an article is at all redeemable, it is (should be) kept and expanded instead.

[1] Normally you want to keep around a copy of "deleted" content in case someone wants to do some sort of check or audit, or might perhaps want to salvage some data that might still be useful. In certain extreme situations like particularly egregious copyright violations, doxing or someone putting up CP or what-have-you, page history access can be denied to admins as well.

The motivation for hiding the history of deleted Wikipedia articles is to minimize legal complaints. E.g. if something is libelous or a copyright violation, they want to remove it.

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

Yet the vast majority of articles are deleted for reasons other than legal.

I found this remarkable irritating myself. I created a Wikipedia page recently for a former TV host, and current podcaster I really enjoy. He's written several books and is cited by other people. I've certainly seen much less noteworthy people having Wikipedia pages.

I spent several hours gathering sources and put together a decent little Wikipedia page. It was voted as being not-noteworthy and removed. I didn't realize all my citations were going to go with it. Wasn't up long enough even to get picked up by the wayback machine.

For future reference, you can instantly archive a page via: https://web.archive.org/save.

If you create an account and log in, it will also give you an option to archive any page linked to by that page, as well.

If all you want is to have a copy of what you wrote, you can ask a Wikipedia admin to temporarily undelete the page (perhaps moving it to your user space). If the reason for deletion was just that the subject was not notable enough, I see no reason for not doing that.

There will always be self righteous gatekeepers.

This is the inevitable result of centralized control.

I liked Metallica better before the Black album and think they're kind of a caricature of themselves now, but to each their own.

I think you could ask an admin for a copy of the deleted article. On my small home wiki, such a request would be fulfilled without any trouble.

As my sibling comments say, you can ask for it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:REFUND

Also it being deleted once doesn't mean it can't ever be made. May be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:TOOSOON for it. Working on it in your draft space and maybe using the articles for creation process if you want more help. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AFC

The “notability” criterion on Wikipedia is remarkably slippery.

In theory, it is objective. There should be no real question about it. It is a synonym for something like “evidenceable,” “researchable,” or “verifiable.” Something is ‘notable’ according not to subjective perception but rather whether you can find third party sources to corroborate basic details. Notability is about the problem of, “You said this podcaster’s real name was X Quasimodo Mogadishu, the X is not short for anything, his literal first name is the letter X... That looks a lot like vandalism to me, is there a third party source that I can consult to confirm if this was vandalism or reality?” If such details are unverifiable, we filethe subject of the article as “not notable” and delete the page until that changes.

In practice, the word is so pliable that it is bent into whatever shape the moderators desire. I have heard “well, this guy is notable in the such-and-so community, just not on the world stage.” my response, “What?! What on earth does that have to do with me finding third party sources to confirm what facts I am seeing in this article? Like, are you saying that the third party sources are encoded in hopeless amounts of jargon such that it is no longer English?” met silence, because of course that's not the point, the point is that the admins can reinvent the definition of notability as they see fit.

Don't feel bad that you got burned. The basic problem is that Wikipedia is a democracy, and democratic governance requires politics, and you came into the situation as a political outsider. Of course it didn't go your way, it only goes your way if you are lucky.

> The basic problem is that Wikipedia is a democracy

No, that is not the basic problem with Wikipedia. Had it been a democracy there would have been ways for Wikipedia readers and writers to influence what Wikipedia editors do. The 'talk' page gives the illusion of allowing such influence but in reality the decisions are made by an in-group which is mostly ideologically homogeneous. This in-group is not the same for all areas of interest but it is stable within interest areas.

Wikipedia is not a democracy, it is a collection of oligarchies - small fiefdoms united under an umbrella organisation which give them the semblance of being democratic. This problem is inherent in the way Wikipedia is organised, there is no neutral arbiter to appeal to when confronted with an ideologically homogeneous and censorious group of editors. The (only?) way out of this conundrum is the same as that for free software projects, namely to fork the project in the hope of creating a better version. While forking the content is easy - there are regular dumps which can be used for this purpose - it is another thing to actually host a successful fork. The Wikimedia foundation is sitting on a pile of donations and can afford the significant resources which go into hosting one of the most popular sites on the 'net. A fork could be hosted on IPFS or in some other way utilise peer-to-peer strategies to offload the burden of hosting popular content in a similar fashion to the way Peertube solves this problem. As far as I'm concerned the ultimate goal of any fork should be to eventually re-join the original project when the 'unbiased' version has shown to be the more popular one. While I do not doubt that an unbiased Wikipedia would be more popular than the current version it is questionable as to whether the Wikimedia foundation would agree on allowing such a re-merger to occur - time will tell.

> Wikipedia is not a democracy, it is a collection of oligarchies - small fiefdoms united under an umbrella organisation which give them the semblance of being democratic.

The argument could be made, that any human grouping/organization of sufficiently large size ceases to be a democracy and devolves into what you describe.

And in my own experience the tipping point is in the hundreds of individuals, not thousands or millions.

The only true democracy is just everyone deciding to ignore you. Everything else is just window dressing on some form of authority.

You ruined my life with this fact.

Any human grouping/organization of sufficiently large size does not start out as a democracy, this is not the natural organisation form for our species. Traditionally groups are hierarchical with a 'strong' leader who leads in times of strife, often combined with a small group of 'wise' men/women who make more strategic/long-term decisions. The idea of democracy is relatively new, originating in the city-state of Athens some 500 years BC. This Athenian democracy was not a full democracy since only citizens had a voice. While that sounds good it should be noted that women, slaves, foreigners and youths below the age of military service were not eligible for citizenship and as such did not have a voice.

A true democracy is hard to achieve at larger scale but modern technology could maybe possibly eventually - yes, there is that much uncertainty - be used to attain it. Then again, even in a true democracy the individual vote can still be controlled by manipulating the voter towards whatever ideological goals desired by the individual or group in control of the information which reaches those voters.

Wikipedia could allow a more democratic form of content moderation by allowing readers to 'score' editorial decisions, a bit like e.g. the Slashdot meta-moderation system works. This would at least make it possible to weed out activist (groups of) editors who use their 'power' to turn the encyclopedia into their propaganda platform.

Wikipedia should not be made more democratic. Democracies are very bad at making encyclopedias. :-P

Note that pretty much any scoring or measurement system invented by man has ended up being subverted and exploited. Especially when there is something to be gained.

This is a classical case of "who watches the watchers". If Wikipedia is not to be made "more democratic" it should at least be possible for the "demos" (people) to point out the flaws in the organisation. While such a system can be gamed just like the current editorial system has been gamed successfully by turning parts of Wikipedia into a propaganda channel it is one more step to be taken for those who wish to game the system. In the absence of a neutral arbiter [1] some form of meta-moderation could help to point out the flaws.

Democracies don't have to make encyclopedias but they can criticise those who make (or, in this case, break) them.

[1] "Let's use machine learning to implement such a neutral arbiter!" - remember the twitter chat bot which supposedly turned racist by mere exposure to Twitter discourse.

The current system is based on "rough consensus" and the formation of smart mobs.

This does have internal checks and balances. It just doesn't quite work like a democracy system works to run a country. Nor does it have to, of course.

I'm interested in hearing what parts of wikipedia (and which wikipedia) you think have been turned into a propaganda channel. That is highly undesirable and should definitely be dealt with if still the case.

> I'm interested in hearing what parts of wikipedia (and which wikipedia) you think have been turned into a propaganda channel.

As to "which Wikipedia" the answer is that of the versions I frequent - English, Dutch, German, Swedish and French - the English-language one seems to be the most affected. Native German and French speakers (who are more likely to have those versions at #1) may want to comment on whether my assessment is correct.

As to "what parts" the answer is less clear since this is a moving target. Anything related to politics is a clear target for ideologically-motivated editors so those parts are a good example but it does not stop there. Articles related to current affairs, media and culture have attracted activist editors as well. There are plenty of studies which show Wikipedia is politically biased to the "left" [1,2,3,4,5,6], this is not simply an issue of a few parts of the site having been taken over.

[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Do-Experts-or-Collecti... ("Harvard study: Wikipedia articles are more left-wing than Encyclopedia Britannica")

[2] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/17-028_e7788... ("Harvard researchers: left-wing editors are more active and partisan on Wikipedia")

[3] http://wikipediocracy.com/2018/08/26/wikipedia-sources-metho... ("top-cited news outlets on Wikipedia are mainly left-wing")

[4] http://archive.is/dDr7X ("pages on American politicians cite mostly left-wing news outlets")

[5] https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/ ("editors who support right-leaning views are over six times more likely to be sanctioned at Arbitration Enforcement than those who support left-leaning views")

Mergers like you mention have happened early on, and they worked.

Last I looked the decisions were not per-se arrived at by an in-group ("The Cabal"). Instead, a lot of it functions by applying smart-mob behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_mob

Note that -at times (and/or at particularly small scales)- it can be really hard to distinguish a smart mob from a cabal, so I can see where the impression comes from.

The 'smart mob' - which is a bit of an odd name when applied to actions centred on a digital platform - can be a way for an in-group to form. Once that in-group has seized control over an interest area they'll (ab)use their power to keep out any further take-over attempts. As long as they are ideologically aligned with the majority of editors they're mostly free to police 'their' interest areas which unfortunately makes this a self-reinforcing structure.

I do know what you mean. At the time when I was still very active, the great majority of the time it really was a smart mob that got misidentified. Very rarely you did get to see an undesirable in-group forming (usually it turned out to be due to misunderstandings, mind). I even wrote a procedure on how to find (among other things) in-groups by exploiting existing natural processes, but I don't think I did a very good job of explaining at the time. (and it has since been rewritten a lot)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:BOLD,_r...

The here-relevant part of the trick was to make a change to a disputed page, and then to observe who reverts it[*]. The person or people who revert it are always going to be interesting in some way.

The new version is actually clearer sometimes, especially the general overview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...

[*] A whole lot of caveats apply.

“Wikipedia is a democracy”

i’m going to need a reliable source for that. meaning: it can only be true if a multi billion dollar corporation says that it’s true

> “Wikipedia is a democracy”

Given that the majority is not an expert on any particular topic, I suppose that is not a good thing, so I would be surprised if it were true.

> Something is ‘notable’ according not to subjective perception but rather whether you can find third party sources to corroborate basic details.

Don't confuse notability and verifiability. Notability requires verifiable evidence, but also that the topic has received "significant coverage" that addresses the topic directly and in detail. (Lots of things are verifiable but trivial.) There are specific, detailed notability policies for everything from academics to music to astronomical objects, and even which individual numbers are notable.

For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_notability_...

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

Wikipedia is not a democracy, or at least it isn't supposed to be. Democracies can do things like decide that pi=3[citation needed]. Some bits look superficially like democratic procedures though. This can catch people by surprise and the outcome of diverse processes can be different to what one might expect.

I do agree with CDrost that some politics is involved. I also traditionally did not agree with the way "Notability" has grown. Originally IIRC it was an eventualist criterion to rescue articles without sources (or bad sources) from deletion... because if things are (obviously) notable, one will definitely be able to find sources eventually.

Now somehow the way notability works has been inverted, even allowing deletion of sourced articles.

There is a parable here about processes getting misread/worn down over time, but I don't quite have all the bits together to write it out in full.

Finally note that most wikipedia processes can be initiated by non-admins, and often are.

That actually doesn't sound objective at all.

You can write a press release about anything and pay a distribution company like $100-400 to get it distributed to hundreds of sites.

You can also pay just $50+ to have a "guest post" on a third party site. Some will not even disclose it's a guest post but either way you can realistically use any name you want regardless.

You could even create your own "third party" site and just post the "objective" info there that is used as a source.

So I guess it is objective but that it can be gamed so easily that it is turned subjective

You can also just pay to have your article included on Wikipedia. I know someone in Hollywood who is very not notable who has an article written about him. He paid a top-level editor to write it to make sure it got through all the bullshit and didn't get deleted. It even states on the editor's page that he was paid to write the article.

Oh yeah that too.

And you can also pay people to insert links in Wikipedia articles too (which have debatable SEO benefits)

I'm not too familiar with Wikipedia policy specifically, but most likely, if you start out by creating the article in your user space (User:$yourUsername/whatever or Special:MyPage/whatever, Special:MyPage will redirect you to User:$yourUsername, including subpages) then that version won't get touched, user sandboxes on most wikis are exactly that and kinda your own space.

Thank you! This is literally the most helpful thing I’ve ever read on Hacker News!

What was the article title?

Interesting that you've had problems with someone with that many sources/public image.

My project has stalled, but there was a point when I was putting together a Wikipedia page for notable composers of the 20th and 21st century. I came up with some criteria that would filter out most of the composers listed on their respective "list of 20th century composers" and "list of 21st century composers". If you haven't seen these lists, they are HUGE and thus pretty useless IMO.

I started going through each composer and so many of them were unknown, barely sourced/dead sources, no website, no music online, recently graduated college, etc.

I flagged a handful of pages and all of them were rejected for deletion. Sometimes the page creators popped out of the blue and fought me on it (and got to vote on the page remaining). I think someone of them had direct connections with the composer.

There are so many tiny pages dedicated to forever-invisible composers, it's awful.

You can see my progress here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:List_of_20th-_and_21st-c...

I did this for about 4 months for my own field (information security) and I was astonished by how much energy people would put in to keeping their vanity pages. There was a whole cluster of articles about a non-notable IT security person, their podcast, and their "hacking group", membership in which extended notability to all sorts of other random people. Somebody in the clique was friends with a particularly aggressive admin, which made it especially difficult to roll any of it back.

I’m sure there’s a whole marketplace around “thought leader” promotion on Wikipedia.

The German Wikipedia article on random/urandom still claims that entropy depletes and using urandom may allow an attacker to "calculate" the random numbers after the fact (whatever that means).

Several people tried to correct it, but since the article author considers the article "his", all discussion attempts were shut down (with gems like "the random number subsystem was programmed by T'so, so it doesn't matter what Torvalds says about the subject"), and all edit attempts were reverted as "vandalism".

This article will claim urandom to be insecure until eternity.

I mean, to be fair, that's a common belief in the industry as well! T'so held it as well!

you can ask for a refund (https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:REFUND) and they'll email your article back to with citations.

I don't understand why, a decade and a half ago, or however long past it was that deletionism started to over overtook inclusionism (after which I quit editing), that they didn't just decide to move "unnotable" content to another mediawiki namespace. The pros works have outweighed the cons, given the cultural memory blackhole situation that has arisen.

Because otherwise there’s no point in removing anything.

A little story some may find amusing and possibly pertinent: many years back one of the Wikipedia editors said something really silly. Silly enough it got reported on. So… I went to see if they had a Wikipedia page. And, of course they did. Despite the fact that they were, objectively, not notable.

So, I did the decent thing and, in a “Haha, only serious” fashion updated the article to include easily the most notable thing they had ever done. Even provided multiple citations and everything.

I mean, everyone here knows what happened next. I didn’t expend any more energy on it.

(For the record, when I say silly I mean it, it was mildly embarrassing, offended no-one and wasn’t problematic in any way.)

This story is elliptical to the point of unintelligibility. Nobody knows what happened next. We can guess a page was deleted from the context of this thread, but we have no idea why.

This is being downvoted, but I too want to know more explicitly what happened. Even link said page because I am now curious.

> We can guess a page was deleted

My interpretation was "the edits were quickly reverted and the editor's page remained flattering and devoid of evidence of notability."

Exactly right. If there was a point I had (and let’s be honest, I was being an arsehole or is have linked the page) it was the policies are ignored when it’s personally inconvenient.

That’s why you see very little on Wikipedia about how they spend the donations…

Were you trying to Disrupt Wikipedia To Make A Point of some sort? %-)

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

You probably got into a modicum of trouble then. I'd love to look up what you actually did. (If only to learn what not to do)

Simple: keeping deleted stuff actually deleted / invisibled keeps Wikipedia from a bunch of lawsuits - in particular, DMCA and libel/defamation laws.

Wiki or Wikipedia?

Echoing a similar concern over Talk pages.

Often enough, particularly in "controversial" topics, the information I want is in the Talk pages rather than the heavily guarded article.

This worked great in the past. More recently I discovered some sort of policy must have changed, which allows Talk pages to be archived/deleted, effectively destroying any evidence of a controversy.

I'm so glad to see that this exists. The world needs this. I can't tell you how many times I wished that I had the time and energy to set this up myself. It's such a tragedy for hard work and human knowledge to disappear into the void just because radical deletionists managed to take over Wikipedia.

The only thing that would make me happier would be if us Inclusionists could get organized, get our shit together, and kick the Deletionist camp on Wikipedia right in the teeth (metaphorically speaking) and shift the tide.

This has existed since 2013[0]. If you haven't noticed it in nine years, how much did the world really need this?

[0]: https://deletionpedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&offset...

I'm always amazed at how quickly we became a pro-censorship society. I always assumed it would take several generations.

Most people are pro-censorship. What people generally disagree on is what should be censored. Some find nudity offensive, for others it’s ideas.

This is always been the case. Eg TV networks have guidelines on what they can and cannot air.

If anything, the internet brought about an unprecedented lack of censorship. But that was only when it was a smaller community of individuals. The moment it snowballed, moderation was needed (whether that was on IRC, BBS or wherever).

Umm… Yeah. I initially wanted to disagree, but then I think about obscenity laws in the USA, and it makes sense. This is similar to people not truly believing in Democracy. They only believe in it when they’re winning.

"truly believing in Democracy"

Right, the reason Democracy degenerates is due inherent disagreement, and the fact a democracy can still vote to stop being a democracy.

It only has one goal, namely not to let a small group of individuals take control. If a small group of individuals then influences the many, the point is rather moot.

But anyways, yeah. Don't censor anything. Instead let people do their own censorship, by which I don't mean censor themselves but censor other for themselves.

Everyone has things they dont want to or can't hear but nothing is unworthy of being said, not even blatantly false or disruptive things.

> Right, the reason Democracy degenerates is due inherent disagreement, and the fact a democracy can still vote to stop being a democracy.

Another possible explanation is that Democracy degenerates because the average person isn’t very bright and has a high time preference. Since the closer a society is to a true democracy the more the inclinations of the average citizen determine policymaking, you see poorly thought out short term plans that snowball over time into an avalanche of dysfunction.

There's all kinds of things that I've wanted that I've not known where to find them. So telling people that something's been available really has no import on how much they want/need something.

I don't think that this being around 9 years and not being noticed has any bearing on whether the world needs this. There are plenty of things that you and I have no idea exist but nonetheless serve important functions.

LSTMs were around for about 17 years before they revolutionised NLP.

There are a ton of things that were created years or decades before they became popular or useful. That's ridiculous logic.

> It's such a tragedy for hard work and human knowledge to disappear into the void just because radical deletionists managed to take over Wikipedia.

After browsing the site and seeing mostly crap, I'm genuinely curious: do you have examples of content erroneously evicted by radical deletionists?

https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/political-deletionism-at-w...

Every topic referenced there is related to racial superiority, at least from a quick skim. I can see why Wikipedia might be gunshy on that front.

Also felt that everything in the article is racially connected. If there was a fundamentally wrong thing with Wikipedia i would expect more topics to be touched.

Furthermore some of the justifications seemed fine, with the only thing I could get behind being that except for unlawful content the history of edits should never be removed. That would be the proverbial rewriting of history, which I find wrong. A pity the author got too caught up calling woke and revealing personal details of supposed conflicts of interest.

Finally calling woke is as much a cannary denominator for ideological activism as reactionary or capitalist. It reeks miles away. If you are anti censorship focus on that.

I've read through the section of this article which discusses the "Jewish Intelligence" page, and find the reasoning behind why we should be mad about the deletion to be extraordinarily weak compared to the explanation given by the editor (the editor that is then ad hominem attacked by the author of the article).

Do you really expect anyone to believe this?

Wow, in one of the cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Article...), they actually deleted the page entirely, then re-created it, so that any prior edit history was lost. Talk about deceptive.

Good thing no-one printed the page out, or we might have to hear one of those "Where they have burned books, they will end up burning people" lectures. But this is "on a computer", so entirely different.

In general, it’s a bad idea to bring up an unrelated controversy as an example when you’re trying to argue for anything, because you’re going to lose a good chunk of your audience who might otherwise be open to your point of view.

The author of this article wants me to believe wikipedia has been taken over by the "super woke" but frankly they just come across as having an unhealthy obsession with IQ as a heritable trait and desperately want to use this to tie race to IQ.

They describe themselves as a "contrarian scientist". At the end the author complains that their wikipedia page has been deleted twice, my heart bleeds.

FYI: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard

There's been quite a lot of techie related content - pages for programming languages, OSS projects, etc. that were deleted as a result of the overly aggressive deletion policies, IMO. No, I'm not going to give you a list though, because I'm not interested in spending my time here arguing over the minutia of whether or not a given page is "really notable". Not wanting to waste my time on that crap is one reason I rarely edit WP anymore, and I'm not going to re-engage in that here. You can find your own examples, or simply disregard my blathering, it's all the same to me either way.

Here's an example: https://deletionpedia.org/en/VList

Ten years ago pjscott mentioned "Phil Bagwell's VList" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4657628 and linked to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VList which (of course) is deleted. The deletion talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... they're talking about how it's not notable enough, but the end result is that Wikipedia is (in my opinion) less comprehensive for the omission.

FWIW, this seems to be a copy of the wikipedia page: http://taggedwiki.zubiaga.org/new_content/f480db09ebb27d442b... and there are some implementations on Rosettacode: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/VList

I've wondered why the VList does not have its own article, nor does RAOTS (cited by Bagwell in his VList paper), which is definitely noteworthy. Instead both are limited to one-sentence descriptions in the Dynamic Arrays page. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_array#Variants]. That more programmer don't know about these two structures is almost criminal, and we're generally stuck with linear complexity linked-lists in almost every language because of it. If these were included in the comparison table on the same page, they would make the ones which are included look bad.

The article on the Kernel Programming Language [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(programming_language)] was deleted some years back, yet is still referenced on the page for fexprs [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fexpr]. Deletion log here:[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&logid...].

> "Minor, academic programming language. Only affiliated references, viz. a tech report by the inventor and his webpage. Some surfing brought up multiple implementations, but no use, no widely-cited papers, no in-dep.."

Kernel is a very innovative language which addressed some time-old complaints about fexprs, and gives a completely new perspective and ways to think about programming, along with a formal calculus to reason about it. [http://web.cs.wpi.edu/%7Ejshutt/kernel.html] I actually discovered Kernel via wikipedia when researching fexprs, and it later became a major focus of my research.

Kernel has been discussed many times on here and elsewhere. It has dozens of implementations. Unfortunately, John Shutt passed away last year, so it is unlikely we will see further developments to Kernel itself.

My best guess is that the deletionist simply didn't understand the topic they were deleting.

There's a group that calls themselves "Guerrilla Skeptics" that worked hard over several years to delete the article about David R. Hawkins (and here's where I would normally link to his Wikipedia article...)

The page itself was deleted, but there's a "Deletion log" about the page where you can see it get restored and deleted back and forth, and read the discussions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delet...

Meanwhile, in Germany: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_R._Hawkins

Interestingly, this article doesn't seem to be on Deletionpedia: https://deletionpedia.org/en/David_R._Hawkins, https://deletionpedia.org/w/index.php?search=David+R.+Hawkin...

Looks like unanswered "issues" like this are on their GitHub also https://github.com/guaka/deletionpedia/issues/28 Here is another example I noticed just now from my memory of watching a deletion battle take place: https://deletionpedia.org/en/David_Wilcock It seem as though the re-deletion detection must have a bug?

Here's some examples:

https://deletionpedia.org/en/ABA_Bank

Appears to be a legitimate bank in Cambodia ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV-9E1_1bXE ). Deleted from the English Wikipedia for lacking "notability". I believe the real issue was the people verifying notability didn't speak Khmer.

https://deletionpedia.org/en/3Pac

Actual rapper, deleted twice from Wikipedia apparently because he's "only notable for dying". His YouTube videos have millions of views, he's mentioned in various music magazines and the Washington Post. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/3pac

Deletion from Wikipedia doesn't mean you don't exist or aren't "a legitimate bank". It means you're not a good subject for the encyclopedia. There are tiny banks all over Chicagoland that don't have Wikipedia pages, and shouldn't.

As for 3Pac, he's mentioned in various music magazines for dying. I might have made the opposite call if I'd been AfD'ing when this was deleted, and I preemptively agree that Wikipedia's policies are tuned for a ~2000s conception of what reliable sources establishing notability are --- 2018 Wikipedia was probably overly skeptical of Youtube fame. But the decision here isn't arbitrary.

Again, you have to understand the policies before you can reasonably critique them. You don't have to agree with their rationales, but you do have to demonstrate that you know what they are, or at least not betray that you don't.

ABA is one of the top banks in Cambodia according to a quick Google search. Comparing it to "tiny banks all over Chicagoland" is unfair. One of a countries top banks should be covered by Wikipedia.

And I have participated in AfDs on Wikipedia before, so I do know something about the policies. That's why I chose these two in particular. Could you show me the policy that says 3Pac isn't notable because the news coverage was based upon his death? He was also mentioned in the Washington Post before his death, albeit very briefly.

The notability criteria specifically exclude mention-in-passing; there needs to be substantial coverage. That's not a goalpost move I just came up with; as always, these things are documented relentlessly on the project pages.

I'm not making a case against an article for "3Pac". Like I said, I probably would have been a "keep" on that AfD. I'm just saying it's not the borderline case you make it out to be.

If ABA is one of the top banks in Cambodia, you should have no trouble finding a reliable source that says that, and then rescue the page. There is a whole class of article that fails at AfD not because the subject isn't truly non-notable, but because the people who wrote the article did a poor job. That's a fixable problem; just go fix it, if you care.

> I probably would have been a "keep" on that AfD

Probably keep, so it sounds like you thinks it's a borderline case.

> I'm just saying it's not the borderline case you make it out to be.

Wait, what?

I stopped fighting for articles like these years ago because I grew to despise arguing over Wikipedia's policies. There's power users who seem to delight in bureaucracy, but for me it just sucks all the enjoyment out of participating in Wikipedia.

That being said, I still make edits to articles sometimes.

Yeah, the second "borderline" is a typo, and should read "open-and-shut" or something. Sorry, message board comments are the log(1.1)th draft of history.

I also stopped contributing to Wikipedia. The places I would have written in are all related to my work, and I found it intensely frustrating to be edited and incorrected by people who knew less about my field but more about Wikipedia's rules. I can see why it's so off-putting! But it later occurred to me that that's as it should be: it's what the project is getting at when it talks about "No Original Research". Wikipedia is a tertiary source; it's a directory of other sources, a map of the available literature. I can't just go into Wikipedia and write how macOS Seatbelt works, because I am not myself a reliable source; I'd be a guidemark on the map pointing to nowhere.

Instead, what I should be doing (to the extent I care about improving the encyclopedia) is writing secondary sources that the encyclopedia can eventually cite. I'm not supposed to be writing on Wikipedia (at least, not in my areas of expertise); I'm supposed to be writing elsewhere.

I've seen that happen a few times, an expert in a field will greatly improve an article, only to have their additions removed or butchered by someone who's far less educated on the subject. The resulting edit war is "won" by the person better versed in Wikipedia's policies, and that's usually not the expert.

The bureaucrat wins, the article gets neutered, and the expert gets so frustrated they never participate in Wikipedia again. To me, it seems like Wikipedia loses more than it gains in this.

And my point is: it's not. The phenomenon you're describing is in fact healthy. Subject matter experts should in fact not cite their own authority when writing in an encyclopedia. They're almost certainly right, whatever they're writing, but that's not the point.

How is that healthy? And what is the point?

I understand the "no original research" policy, there needs to be verifiable sources. What I don't get is the tendency to discourage experts from writing about the subjects they know the best. I'd much rather have someone who is "almost certainly right" have the final say on an article.

Of course, verifying that someone actually is an authority would be a huge ordeal in itself...

The discouragement experts get on Wikipedia is being forced to cite --- to Wikipedia's standards --- points that they would not need to cite in their own writing. They're used to writing for their peers, with much of what they have to say being accepted common knowledge. That doesn't work on WP, at least not under scrutiny. For an expert, writing on WP is much more tedious than writing anywhere else. A Wikipedia editor goes in expecting the exercise to be about organizing citations; a subject matter expert goes in expecting the exercise to be about (say) science communication. The subject matter expert should write articles that WP cites, not WP pages.

What I think people miss in these arguments is that Wikipedia is about the citations. It's a directory of sources. If it says something important, that thing needs to be footnoted to something readers can go find and read directly. That is the point.

Lots of people see other things Wikipedia could be about. They're not wrong: it could be about those things. But it's not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...

I don't have an example handy, but I disagree that Wikipedia is about the citations. It _should_ be about the citations, but I often come across pages (usually medical/health related) that have citations where the Wikipedia page says something completely different from the source that is cited.

If Wikipedia were about the citations, I would expect to see a larger effort in verifying that page content reflects what the source says.

They fall short of their goals all the time. I'm just saying: (1) they're clear about what their goals are, and (2) they're sensible goals. And, it's hard to argue with a project as successful a sthis.

“coverage”

do you mean like on TV or something? no one watches that

Deletionists claim that only non notable articles get removed, yet a couple months ago I encountered someone wanting to delete the article on DokuWiki.

DOKUWIKI!

Someone had a spreadsheet full of links talking about DokuWiki that were poo pooed because the articles didn't have someone claiming to have an editor on them, the fact that a 2018 book was written on DokuWiki wasn't enough, nor was the 80 page views per day average usage of the page.

The thing that saved the second most popular wiki software aside from mediawiki itself were additional comments about references to DW in other books, as well as one of the original deletist voters withdrawing in order to avoid some sort of sealioning potential optics, something I can't fully follow but seems only tangentially related.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_delet...

I love Wikipedia to pieces, but I have given up trying to contribute to it, because only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police. I assume these are many of the same people as the Deletion Police. A pox on all their houses.

What kind of thing have I had reverted? For example, often when I have just watched a film, I like to read its Wikipedia page. Often I spot minor errors in the plot synopsis while the details are fresh in my mind, and make minor edits to fix those errors. Often, they get reverted. So now I don't bother.

Reverters and deleters may achieve what Big Content longed to do but couldn't -- kill Wikipedia.

People say things like this, and I believe them. But can you provide some examples of edits you've made that didn't "survive the Reversion Police"? One very good thing about Wikipedia is that most of what happens on it is logged; Wikipedia Jurisprudence works for the most part the way people HN say real jurisprudence should work: with version control. Let's talk about specific examples! You should have a bunch, given what you just wrote.

Most of Wikipedia --- probably the most intellectually impressive project on the entire global Internet --- was built during the reign of the deletionists, just in case you're concerned about them "killing" the project.

> only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police.

Could you provide three examples?

Huh, do you think the parent comment was lying?

Wikipedia is like, well, a lot of social knowledge tools where there's special roles (e.g., Stack Overflow, GitHub projects) - some people build prestige by contributing content, some people seek to build prestige by gatekeeping the contributions of others.

What tends to happen is that someone makes this complaint and either (a) provides no examples or (b) the examples show that reverting them was clearly a good idea. So I'm asking for three examples that make their case, because it might be even slightly convincing - because the bare statement tends to case (b).

Good. I have seen editors exclude articles on actual public figures — multiple (credible) books published, academic publications, interviews on mainstream media — as being "irrelevant", "unimportant", etc., etc., all seemingly because, when the editor's chain of edits is examined, that person took a position with with the editor strongly politically or policy-wise disagreed with on the strongest terms. The editor system is one of Wikipedia's greatest weaknesses — people with bones to pick and hills to die on work to exclude even mainstream views with which they disagree, and there is no way to stop them from running amok. Something really needs to be done about this.

I read through wikipedia AfD occasionally for fun (yeah, I know, I'm a weirdo). I'm not going to say it's never happened ever, but I've never noticed an AfD that ended up with a delete consensus that was obviously started due to an editor's political bias.

Can you provide examples to substantiate this claim?

Sure.

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

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/female-scientists-pages-...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wikipedia-bias-1.6129073

Can you elaborate on how those examples prove your claim? None of those examples seem to show a political bias.

Ok...Kendrick — attacked specifically for questioning the role the cholesterol in heart disease and the efficacy of statins. Read through the discussion and it becomes clear that there are fundamentalists who don't want anyone who, rightly or wrongly, questions a current medical orthodoxy to even be noted. Keeping them off WP in this way is an attempt to write such dissident voices off as loons and not even worth investigating, to make it such that when someone does not appear on WP, it will be a sign that they're not even at the edge of the conversation.

Is the role of chloresterol in heart disease a political topic somewhere I'm not aware of? I'm not here to argue about whether or not other biases exist on Wikipedia.

You specifically claimed political bias and I specifically challenged that claim. If you'd like to retract that claim and walk it back to bias against medical unorthodoxy, that's ok with me.

I'd suggest that it is political insofar as money = power. Consider how valuable an editor could be to a company with an interest in keeping criticism of its product(s) out of the public eye — WP's lack of transparency makes questions about the above possible.

At the same time, note I also said or policy-wise — there are plenty of vested interests with government backing for standardized care policies, which can include prescriptions (side example — government diet standards trickle down into the food provided for everyone in Federal care of one sort or another). Standards of care put requirements on doctors, and maintaining those standards of care is of quite some importance to those who have built reputations and careers based on certain drugs and procedures, and to a host of other parties. If these sorts of things aren't political, and tied to political interests, I'm not sure what could be.

This is just generic speculation about how the issue could be political. Yes, if someone is influencing governments to say chloresterol is bad because they benefit from a related drug/procedure - that _would_ be political.

However, all we have so far is baseless speculation. You are yet to provide any evidence to support any of the claims that:

- Anti-chloresterol lobbying/bribery/influence exists

- Kendrick's ideas are political in any other way (not imaginations about how they could be political with no evidence)

- The poster of the AfD has a political bias against Kendrick (ex. they support anti-chloresterol lobbyists)

Unfortunately, this discussion is looking more and more like those I've had with conspiracy theorists, so I assume any future posts you make still won't contain any proof of these claims - please prove me wrong.

Another answer & you'll just ask for more evidence; not gonna dance to your tune. There's a clear pattern in your posts. Have a good day.

You haven't posted any evidence. Thanks for admitting you have none: have a good day.

I gave you evidence, which is clearly what you didn't want. Weak sauce, dude.

I'm kinda wondering about future. I can well imagine that some current minor minister of a country is notable enough for now, but what about 10 or 20 years in future? Will their articles just end up deleted? Even if they were perfectly good and factual?

Notability is not time limited on Wikipedia. Wikipedia notability guidelines on politicians states that members of national level legislative bodies are automatically notable, so the articles will stay as long as Wikipedia in all likelihood.

I wonder if a editor action review process would help here. If reviewers were themselves reviewed for their actions, and promoted/demoted based on their adherence to a set of public guidelines.

...for example, deleting an article that you took a political position on - should get you demoted from being a reviewer in general.

>If the article is retained on Wikipedia the article is emptied on Deletionpedia.

That doesn't necessarily seem to always be the case. Though it apparently was on other pages. For the second article that got randomly served to me (Aixa de la Cruz), it was proposed for deletion but kept. Citrine (programming language) is another.

While I'm largely on the inclusionist side of the fence, I have to admit that most of the pages I flipped through were either very thin, probably had legitimate notability issues, and/or were probably self-promotional.

Yeah this is a really hard problem. There is stuff that legit should be deleted because it's either BS or spam. I somewhat wish there was a setting like "show dead" that HN has.

These are mostly vanity pages for people. Now if I add myself to wikipedia, it will at least end up somewhere!

No. I try to add wikipedia for Open Source Software that are used in many places but that aren't giant and not well known outside of tech circles, and they get deleted, typically for lack of noteriety or not enough external references, sometimes 5 or 6 years later.

It is very discouraging.

It is very discouraging.

Exactly. What the Deletionists seem to miss is the extent to which their entire position is based on negativity, and how that negativity poisons the well for everybody. Imagine spending hours, or days, or weeks writing a detailed, well-documented, heavily-interlinked, high-quality page only to have it shot in the head in a Deletionist Driveby. Would you ever edit another Wikipedia page again after an experience like that?

If someone were literally being paid to push an agenda online as a day job, they would want to eliminate all organic desire to produce content leaving only the somewhat more influential paid content.

Just because site X is not paying for user generated content, does not mean no people are being paid to generate content on site X.

Always follow the money.

Okay, so, who by you is paying Wikipedia to peddle which agenda?

The pretzel logic people tie themselves into to make the world fit their narratives is simply astonishing.

What the Inclusionists seem to miss is the fact that an encyclopedia isn't The Hitchhiker's Guide or Angelfire, and that every page on the site incurs ongoing volunteer time to patrol for vandalism and corrections. Also, the idea that maybe it's OK if everyone doesn't edit Wikipedia pages; maybe some people should write secondary sources rather than tertiary ones.

Wikipedia is not limited by the number of pages that exist in a volume. A given page existing doesn't generally make it harder to find another entry. The notability criterion is more applicable to an encyclopedia limited by disc or paper space.

Space has nothing to do with the limitation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence

What the Inclusionists seem to miss is the fact that an encyclopedia isn't The Hitchhiker's Guide or Angelfire,

No, we're all quite aware of that.

I claim that you are not, because your points don't cohere with the concept of an encyclopedia.

A compendium of knowledge can't be a compendium of knowledge if it has too much knowledge in it?

Again, you can't win an argument by pulling out a dictionary. Wikipedia is clear about what its goals are.

What the Deletionists seem to miss is the fact that, since there's not a space problem, then perhaps Wikipedia doesn't have to limit itself to being an encyclopedia of 'articles'. Long ago, for example, lots of people kept 'Commonplace books'. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts....

Something that isn't an article can still be very useful. EG Wikipedia has little to say about "Edmond Halley Sr." [sic; his name's Edmond Humphrey Halley], a father who proved critical to his son's success, and whose mysterious death complicated his son's life in multiple ways. I spent two hours online learning how and why (w/cites), but there's no room in the WP inn for publishing that summary.

None of them miss that fact. It's the most basic, common argument people throw at their position. People who know virtually nothing about what Wikipedia is --- see: this thread --- have no trouble coming up with that argument off the top of their head.

Once again: space has nothing to do with the argument for Deletionism. It isn't an elaborate form of garbage collection and encyclopedia-compression. If you're going to argue against their position, you have to go read what it is. They're not hiding it; this may be the most elaborately, carefully documented policy on any major site on the Internet, and your argument doesn't engage with it at all.

Oh I know the arguments, and I'm more than long-familiar with the tactics and their motivations.

I'm arguing for the addition of a new branch to which serious researchers might append their (cited) notes without all the additional labor needed to create a whole 'acceptable' article. (For all I care, they could even load them down with all the usual, tired caveats.)

This stuff can just go somewhere else online that's much harder to find. No skin off my ass if WP has no alternate mechanism to add serious, skilled research. (Compare to any great library....) Any WP user who wants more will, individually, have to put in the same 2 hours I did. Great solution.

I write every page in the English and French wikipedia. I run in the deletion problem only in the English Wikipedia, the pages in French are still up.

That was not my experience when clicking on "random page" a couple dozen times for fun.

Store chains that went out of business. Airliner crashes with substantial property loss and injury but no fatalities. Abandoned software that was moderately influential in the past. Hardware that's no longer manufactured and someone wants to memory hole it. Schools that nobody "cool enough" graduated from, but obviously a lot of regular people graduated from. I hit exactly one individual out of perhaps 25 articles and he was a minor league professional soccer athlete, actually kind of surprised he got deleted, you would think superfans of the team would rally to keep that kind of info.

It was all the kind of stuff where someone with a reason to research would be painfully inconvenienced by its removal or someone with a personal connection would feel bad if it were deleted. The work of the usual people on the internet whom get off on making people feel bad. None of it was literally useless in the sense of lists of serial numbers of dollar bills by year number or similar. Actually if an article like that, if it existed, would be a gold mine for someone trying to research anti-counterfeiting technologies or someone being paid to write anti-counterfeiting software or a coin collector trying to verify authenticity of a collectible, so I'm sure people whom get off on causing others pain would push HARD to delete an article like that and would enjoy the resulting feeling of having caused pain.

There are a lot of issues around notability, not least of all the availability of third party sources which varies by a ton of things including pre-and post- internet notability. But also the nature of their or its notability. On the one hand, you likely have articles on fairly minor actors and pro athletes and you probably don't have articles on many tenured professors at major universities even though they're pretty much by definition notable in their fields--but there may not have been much written about them as a person.

> Abandoned software that was moderately influential in the past. Hardware that's no longer manufactured and someone wants to memory hole it.

This one is a bit surprising to me. From my perspective, wikipedia seems to have a strong computer nerd bias. There are articles about obscure text editors that have probably only been used by a few dozen people in the last 30 years, but if you try looking up information about industrial/construction hardware (blue collar stuff..) the articles are often very short (when they exist at all) and often don't have history sections.

Here are yesterday's AfD's on actual Wikipedia:

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

These are the borderline calls; Deletionpedia is a subset of this stuff, as it apparently captures the speedy deletes, which are much worse.

Nim had to face the deletion nazis for a while for not being "notable" enough:

https://deletionpedia.org/en/Nim_(programming_language)

Meanwhile Wikipedia's own policies are violated with the comprehensive detailed list of Pokemon and sub-articles that really belongs on a dedicated wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon

Most programming languages start out non-notable. I've built 3 of them. None of them belong in the encyclopedia!

Do you really think that the subject of a Wikipedia article should decide whether they are notable or not? Seems a bit hypocritical given your deletionist stance.

I don't remotely understand this question.

I agree, there are a ridiculous number of vanity pages on Wikipedia and quite frankly, grossly inconsistent enforcement. Wikipedia is being used as a tool for building a personal profile and achieve SEO goals around Google searches for particular people's name.

My particular pet peeve are the surprising number of bios of wealthy people who have done absolutely nothing remarkable or noteworthy other than be exceptionally successful at marketing themselves, which allows them to get their name pop up in the occasional mainstream media article. Of course those mentions are just churnalism in a puff section of the newspaper, cobbled together from quotes ripped out of a press release. But apparently that's enough to satisfy "notability". And of course these articles are almost always predominantly maintained by single purpose accounts; most likely sock puppets of the person in question.

Shame they don't seem to have a copy of the Bear versus Lion article. Wikipedia still has Tiger versus Lion and articles for Bear-baiting and Lion-baiting, but the Bear versus Lion article seems to be lost. Archive.org doesn't even have it. I'm quite sure it once existed though.

Thus site really helps to establish one's position on deleteionist vs inclusioninst debate.

Internet arguments often choose the example of deleted articles to illustrate their point, so one cannot get overall "feel" of the quality of delete pages. But hitting "Random Page" link on that website shows a nice, unbiased random sample.

Thank you. There is almost 100,000 deleted articles. I don't get why they would do this to so many topics.

>I don't get why they would do this to so many topics.

It's a form of censorship, hence a form of thought control.

It's mostly a form of spam-control.

well, isn't most of free speech just de-facto spam?

Sure, which is why no one is legally obligated to host it.

>spam-control

Can you explain what was so spammy about this one? https://nypost.com/2022/04/23/wikipedia-deletes-entry-for-hu...

First off, it's now a redirect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rosemont_Seneca...

Second, the article links to the archived comments about the deletion (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_delet...), wherein an editor explains

> This organization is only mentioned in connection with its famous founders, Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz, from whom it cannot inherit notability per WP:NORG. Every single source is a trivial mention in an article about the founders; that means it fails WP:GNG as well. Keeping it around additionally risks WP:BLPVIO, as this is a magnet for conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.

Seems pretty clear cut to me. Write the parts that deserve to be in the Hunter Biden page in the Hunter Biden page. Don't make a stub article just so you can mention an otherwise unnotable company.

It’s crazy how people feel entitled to have somebody else host their “thoughts” on the Internet.

As the project at hand shows, if Wikipedia doesn’t want to host your page, you can simply publish elsewhere.

Nobody is posting their “thoughts” on Wikipedia, it's for encyclopedic articles. By controlling the content of those, you control what many people consider the truth.

An encyclopedia is by definition curated and controlled. The brilliance of the Internet and open content licensing is that you can fork Wikipedia if you don’t like their editorial choices. This wasn’t possible with a thirty-volume print edition of Britannica.

Of course if you want to make people look to your version instead of the one at wikipedia.org, you probably need to invest in marketing. In theory nothing stops you from becoming the new source of authority — after all Wikipedia has only held this role for less than twenty years, and nobody remembers what was the #1 result site for these search queries then.

Sure, in the sense that literally any text is thought control.

Eh, I think that paring down excess content is important for just about any organizational effort.

I'm not convinced that most of this content was worth including on Wikipedia, but hey, if these people want to host it they should go for it.

Why? It’s not like a printed encyclopedia; there really aren’t space limitations in any meaningful way.

Too much noise often makes it hard to find the signal. It's also difficult to sustain any quality/accuracy, especially if the topics are too obscure.

This is like a discussion the other day on streaming service quality. Even if the "crap" isn't completely without value to anyone, dump 100,000 low quality/value pieces of content into anything and it's that much harder to find (and trust) the good content.

Apart from too much noise a lot of it is duplicated effort as well. E.g. Cherry RC is indeed deleted but so it can be a redirect to RC Cola which already talks about it. Letting those exists just serves to dilute the quality of the articles on the topic even though the overall article count is higher.

Because a digital encyclopedia is still an encyclopedia rather than an archive of everything (which is a different and useful thing as well and also happens to exist in various forms).

There really are limitations to the amount of time the core editors and administration have to devote to it though. Even if they could keep on top of the blatant spamming and self promotion and nutty theories and articles created purely to harass, if you have an order of magnitude more pages you have an order of magnitude more pages that can get out of date, be vandalised, be total bullshit etc.

Quite a few were not actually deleted; not sure how to tally those that were.

Take a look through what is deleted, it's mostly junk. In my experience Wikipedia could stand to be more aggressive with its pruning. Low quality articles waste your time because you have to read them for a bit before you realize it is worthless.

Looking at some deleted articles [1], I do get it. There seem to be hundreds of articles of asteroids which consist of only a few sentences. A lot of small or already defunct startup companies, small indie-bands and their albums etc.

[1] https://deletionpedia.org/en/Special:AllPages

Yep, exactly. For the curious, and without casting aspersions on the individual (be nice!), here is an example of a non-notable page created for self-promotion: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Damith_Madhusanka...

It's currently up for speedy deletion, and will probably be removed soon.

Just tried looking at it, and it's already deleted

"I don't get why they would do this to so many topics."

Self-promotion and non-notable content.

Pretty early in Wikipedia's existence all sorts of spammers and non-entities realized that they could use Wikipedia as their personal advertising billboard.

Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too. For example, you could, arguably, have an article about every one of the 7 billion people on the planet and about what foods each of them like, etc.

Inclusionists might like all such articles to be included, but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted.

Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too.

Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia though, not in any traditional sense. Just because they use that word in the byline doesn't mean that it makes sense to pretend that Wikipedia is a 1980's door-to-door-salesperson bound edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. And in the same sense, it makes no sense to try and apply the same standards and policies from an outdated legacy media format to an entirely new media format.

but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted.

The problem with this mind-set is the idea that there is some objective, universally applicable idea of what it means to be "non notable". There isn't.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and the fact that you think it could or should be something else doesn't change that.

Wikipedia doesn't claim that there is a universal objective definition for "notability". "Notability" is a term of art on Wikipedia. You can't win this argument with a dictionary.

There may be nothing in the world a true Wikipedian would rather do than explain the project's definition of a word like "Notability", at ponderous, relentless, unceasing length. So ignorance is no excuse! There's more documentation for this concept than there is for Postgres. RTFM, friend.

If you don't like Wikipedia's rules or think it could be something more, you are welcome to fork it.

You can't win this argument with a dictionary.

I'm not trying to win any argument. shrug

RTFM

Been there, done that. Thanks for playing though.

Google Knol pretty much let anyone write their own article on anything. It was not a success.

The only times I've felt frustration looking up things and finding them deleted was like some minor god from mythology of which there likely wasn't much written as there isn't much known anywhere TBH

It's worth noting that Wikidata has far more inclusive standards than any Wikipedia, though it still excludes true vanity submissions. Many of these deleted items could get a Wikidata entry if they don't have one already.

Having started to occasionally edit stuff on Wikipedia over the pandemic, I have a newfound understanding of the reasons for deleting stuff.

As a casual user, you will, by definition, tend to see the most-trafficked, well-maintained pages. Deleted pages, as a general rule, are not those. Your impression of the level of quality that can be achieved is completely off. This is also true if you read a lot in some specialized subject that has a small, but active and productive community (some pop culture fandoms, for example).

Leave the beaten paths at your own risk, especially if it concerns anything that has small communities with differences of opinion. Like foreign wars.

Example: this page about some soldier in the Balkan wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Milan_Tepić&oldid...

This isn't the worst I've seen, but something I remembered because I tried to clean it up recently. It includes a long discussion that has little to do with the subject, is obviously the product of a tug-of-war between opposing POVs and fails to present the subject in a way that would allow the reader to come to any conclusion. Or, at least, I still have no idea if this guy is a war criminal, hero, or both.

And this is the stuff that doesn't get deleted.

The other standard is obviously self-serving content, i. e. articles written by the subject or the subject's employees/PR people etc. There is simply no way to deal with the fundamental problem that an article's subject always has far more interest in an article than any random editor without limiting the scope to subjects that attract at least a few interested editors without a conflict of interest.

> that an article's subject

or the subject's enemies...

There are a tremendous amount of defamatory hit pieces that show up too. I wonder in a S230 analysis if deletionpedia itself is the publisher of this material: after all, it wasn't the original author that went and dug it up and published it on their site. I hope they've received good legal advice.

My first taste of Wikipedia’s controversial policies was on an entry for the song “Regulate” by rapper Warren G. Someone posted a synopsis of the lyrics which various Wikipedia editors found “clinical to the point of parody” (paraphrasing) and thus worthy of reversion. I have never been able to look at Wikipedia the same since.

What's wrong with reverting content that isn't relevant for the encyclopedic format of Wikipedia? A decent example of this might be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempted_(Squeeze_song)#Backg..., which goes into the background of the song without analyzing every lyric. Save that for Genius.

This is a famous case. I can almost understand why they got rid of the extended synopsis. For anyone who wants to read it, here's a copy on Reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/4z3u55/wikipedias_ex...

This is hilarious, haha. There are people who wanted to keep this?

The worst part of Wikipedia is the arcane rules and procedures.

Wikipedia tries to keep things consistent, but this has created a whole body of “case law” that only experts know.

I once described a law that had been proposed, but not passed, and had my contribution removed because it was “legal advice.”

I couldn’t even wrap my head around that one.

I remember when a historian who wanted to correct common misceptions in articles would have his updates reverted. The common views are not always correct. Such as Canada didn't have troops in Vietnam. Canada had MASH medical units, and theres even a canadian webpage listing medals award and names who served in Vietnam.

He finally kept his updates on his personal page, but then wikipedia made it you couldnt find his page.

Then I started finding that was the common idea on Wikipedia, deleting views from wikipedia that didnt meet the popular editors. Pages got deleted with rules that didnt make sense, not popular enough, not reported by main stream news, no articles found, etc.

I'm old enough to remember news and events that counter the popular views, and those events are not even in historical news articles. The re-writing of history has been going on in wikipedia launched, its more common than you think.

My favorite wikpedia fake excuse, they dont have enough space to include non-popular historical events, its history, authors who trended all the talk shows even oprah and made nytimes best seller, etc, are removed from history.

Theres entire mainstream history in 80's that don't match reality, and was deleted. The narrative of groups in charge, are the ones who get reported.

Those who control the history books they say.

Pages are technically technical debt. I understand why unpopular topics are not maintained. I've not seen anything that would suggest something systematic (especially cross language).

Can you elaborate about the active effort you suspect exists? (Rewriting implies authorship)

> I'm old enough to remember news and events that counter the popular views, and those events are not even in historical news articles.

I would be genuinely fascinated to learn some examples of this.

This is something I've been suspecting for a long time, but I can rarely put my finger on anything specific.

But I'm sure we're all being collectively gaslit.

Lots of things feel disconcerting these days, like reality is being erased and shifted.

> Canada had MASH medical units

Are you sure you're not talking about Red Cross teams from Canada (not exactly Canadian troops).

> and theres even a canadian webpage listing medals award and names who served in Vietnam.

Aren't you talking about Canadian recipients of US medals (because they joined the US military)?

There were also those involved with the ICCS during the US withdrawal, various defense companies who sent contractors to work on equipment in Vietnam for their US customers, etc.

No, this was 20+ years ago, he had links and to canadian military websites. It wasnt the canadians who joined the US military or Red Cross.

If only his page still existed.

I don't think that this is actually true-- other than the ICRC, the small number of Canadian advisors at the beginning of the war, the small number of Canadian peacekeepers at the end, the extensive number of Canadian volunteers for US military service, and the employees of Canadian defense companies that travelled to Vietnam to support US equipment. There were also some humanitarian civilian missions.

There's tons of newspapers, etc, online from this period. It's hard to believe that no primary nor secondary source would have survived of what you're describing.

Too bad the wikipedia article comments are deleted.

> a historian who wanted to correct common misceptions in articles

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

The rest of your comment is extremely vague, and gives no links to back anything up.

So? I commented on deleted entries 20+ years ago I saw, about a new site that shows deleted entries.

Even the historical comments are deleted, why would they want to ban the debates.

Yeah, no agenda anywhere. /s

> The common views are not always correct.

This is undoubtedly so, but the point of wikipedia is to record the common view. The criterion for inclusion is acceptance in the mainstream sources, not truth.

The Wikipedia article for Michael Aquino would be a great one to see added here. Lt Colonel in the US Army who wrote a seminal paper on psychological operations, had close ties to the highest levels of NATO command in Europe, performed a ritual with an SS dagger at Wewelsburg Castle in Germany, and was an outspoken Satanist who was credibly accused of child abuse in the Presidio daycare scandal. One can see why a lot of people might not mind that his page was deleted and now redirects to "Temple of Set."

Damn, I'm surprised they deleted his page. He was a real nutjob, but a notable nutjob. I have a pdf of one of his books about psyops archived somewhere.

> credibly accused of child abuse in the Presidio daycare scandal

Man, I thought everything to do with the Satanic Panic was memory holed.

Would be interesting if there was an easy way to find “controversial” pages. If a page has a significant amount of edits or discussions prior to deletion for example.

More and more it feels like the death of Wikipedia is coming and maybe that's a good thing, thus making space for the next "Wikipedia" that could improve on many shortcomings of the current implementation.

It happens so often on the internet that people who lack competency to be a just moderator, end up being moderators and then abusing the power that was entrusted to them, without any consequences...

It's just sad...

It's nice to have once again a authoritative link to this page [1]. A shame that wikipedia think this is irrelevant information.

https://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_PlayStation_2_games_wit...

An analogue project for the German Wikipedia is Marjorie Wiki (https://marjorie-wiki.de/wiki/MARJORIE-WIKI). Do similar projects exist for other languages?

Personally I don’t understand this “notability” deletion process. It’s text, even the most unremarkable article weighs less than ephemeral logs.

Additive metadata is more than as effective for filtering and boosting what’s relevant.

It’s a really asinine policy, I’m glad this project exists

As a teenager ~18 years ago, I joined ADW (Association of Deletionist Wikipedians) and I was very proud of myself. We took down a lot of personal vanity pages, per the Wikipedia is An Encyclopedia policy (at odds with the Wikipedia is Not Paper policy). I also led the push to get a lot of pokemon pages deleted as not notable. I'm not sure how I feel about all that now. Deleting the vanity pages that people put up about themselves probably improved the platform, but the pokemon were harmless.

I've noticed that one article which was marked for deletion on Wikipedia is marked as "hooray survived deletionism" on deletionpedia, but only got changed to a redirect after a lot of data was deleted.

https://deletionpedia.org/en/Jeopardy!_College_Championship

For more on Wikipedia's slow transformation from a culture of inclusionism to one of deletionism, see Gwern's fantastic "In Defense of Inclusionism" here: https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism

There is not point currently in trying to fix an error when you read an article in Wikipedia. In the 99% of the cases is reverted automatically when you quit the page to keep the wrong statement. The momentum when it was cool to help there has passed.

Unfortunately deletionpedia only grabs pages that are previously marked on Wikipedia in some way. The disappearing tech-related articles I've been looking for (smaller programming languages, "Quote notation") can't be found there.

Whatever happened to the critics who ran a protest site called Wikitruth? Did it go offline? Was there some controversy? I'd check their Wikipedia page but they really don't have one.

Deleted articles aren't THAT big an issue, since most articles that get deleted are crap (there are exceptions). Maybe more important is idiots reverting good edits or otherwise removing info from articles, without the articles themselves getting deleted. The info is thus retained in the edit history, but it's harder to programatically recover, because: the context changes in later editing; it's hard to distinguish information removal from ordinary editing/rewriting; there are tons of automated edits that are just plain noise with no clear way to distinguish them from human edits, etc. I've been wanting to spend some time on this some day.

Any relation to this other Deletionpedia? http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/

Are all deleted articles weighed equally? If a bio page is deleted because it's self-promoting does it still appear regardless?

Would be weird if they didn't include those pages on a "radical inclusionist" wiki.

What are some examples of really great deleted articles that we now have the opportunity to read thanks to this site?

Seems like this site is dead as of Sept 2020. Or maybe the auto-publishing bot is under a different name now?

Hence why it's nice to have your own copies of things. They won't get altered or disappeared.

I'd like something similar for flagged articles and comments here on HN.

Hell yeah man!

Wikipedia deleted the entry for a company called Rosemont Seneca Partners which was the financial firm of the younger son of Joe Biden, i.e. Hunter Biden.

The stated reasoning behind the deletion was that it is not a notable company.

This company is discussed extensively in the emails recovered from the laptop of Hunter Biden. News of these emails was censored by Twitter and Facebook just before the 2020 election. It is widely believed by millions (including the new owner of Twitter) that this was a partisan move. Jack Dorsey has remarked that this was a mistake that he rectified as soon as he came to learn of it, which was several weeks after the censorship.

At the time of the news story, Facebook announced that they were "reducing the spread" of this story. The move was announced by Andy Stone, who is and was the erstwhile head of communications at Meta, and also by total coincidence, was previously a staff member for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, and "House Majority PAC", a political action group whose stated mission is to ensure the majority of the Democratic Party in the US House of Representatives.

One of the people in the emails was Tony Bobulinski - a former US Navy Seal Lieutenant. He clarified the context in one of the emails which referenced a "10%" cut for the "big guy". This was a reference to current President Joe Biden, per Bobulinski.

Over a year after the election, the Washington Post confirmed the authenticity of the emails from the laptop. Facebook's aforementioned Andy Stone announced at the time that stories about the contents of the email were "eligible for checking by third party fact-checkers" and that the spread of the story would be reduced until they returned a verdict. Stone has announced no verdict thus far.

Many are quick to point to the Streisand effect when discussing this topic, which while relevant, does not address the apparent coordinated nature of the censorship behind this story, wherein the same incorrect conclusion was drawn by multiple parties on the basis of no evidence.

This is the type of thing we see happening in third world countries quite often, where the government and the ruling party have an iron grip over the media. Just this week we have seen governments cut off internet access entirely as an effort to curb the spread of disinformation. To see first world countries engaging in similar behavior leaves one with little hope for the future of democratic rule.

Recently it was Israel's Independence Day. I was looking for something about Israel's War of Independence and I saw these Wikipedia articles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_Wa... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_... . Imagine if the article on the American Revolutionary War was renames to the First British American War. I've come to simply expect that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for anything somewhat political.

English Wikipedia is written from PoV of English sources (and therefore English-speaking countries). It should use a name that is most common in those countries.

A quick search for "1948 Arab Israeli War" shows several links from US and pro-Israel sources using the term, which seems to be a relatively neutral way to refer to it:

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-... https://israeled.org/the-arab-israeli-war-of-1948-a-short-hi...

While the term British-American War is not in active use, I don't think either side would have any problem with it. It's not like there is any secret the Americans were fighting against the British.

My favorite example of this is when Apple renamed Mac OS X to "macOS", someone went around and retroactively renamed nearly every mention of "OS X" on Wikipedia to "macOS" even in situations where it makes absolutely no sense, as "macOS" did not exist during the topic/time period which the article references.

No offense, as long as the titles match what is used in English media (for English wikipedia) and even lists other common names in the lede, then that's fine. Also redirect from other known names. Being offended by lack of content is one thing, being offended by a different title than you expect is a bit much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com