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.
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.
This is the inevitable result of centralized control.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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")
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.
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.
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
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.
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_...
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.
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.
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
And you can also pay people to insert links in Wikipedia articles too (which have debatable SEO benefits)
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...
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.
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.
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.)
My interpretation was "the edits were quickly reverted and the editor's page remained flattering and devoid of evidence of notability."
That’s why you see very little on Wikipedia about how they spend the donations…
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)
I'm sure it goes against their terms of service, but it would be really great for getting rid of censorship.
That's the reason, I'm sure, even Deletionpedia has a removal process: https://deletionpedia.org/en/Deletionpedia.org:Removal_reque...
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Viewing_deleted_cont...