The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

I did sort of chuckle when I realized this was about an SEO/SEM person, though, as I've run into this kind of angry reaction outside Wikipedia as well. If you run a private wiki/forum/whatever, it's not uncommon to run into people attempting to "organically" contribute links to themselves, who seem to think they're being very clever and incognito when in fact their contributions look spammy from a mile away, and then get extremely indignant and try to raise an internet-stink when you delete their contributions.

In the end it's not about votes either. We leave long explanations as our points for or against. We weigh the arguments. It prevents the "+1 me too! I agree!" responses from adding to it so consensus by vote doesn't always matter.

1. Danny Sullivan hears that his friend Jessie Stricchiola, a pioneer in fighting click fraud, has been deleted from Wikipedia.

2. He somehow gets to a discussion about the deletion of her page on Wikipedia. On it is a debate between 13 people about whether her page should be deleted, and at the top of that page is a detailed explanation by the editor that made the final decision why that decision was made.

3. At the top of this page is an explanation that this page is an archive, and that any comments should be added to the article's "talk page" or a "deletion review". The text for "deletion review" is a link to this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review which explains Wikipedia's deletion review policies, and offers a pretty clear six step process for having a deletion reviewed.

4. Author rages and instead writes on archive page. Summary: a. Stricchiola was a founding member of SEMPO, the largest trade group of the search marketing industry. b. Stricchiola was the earliest, and the largest stature person in the area of click fraud. c. Co-authored a popular book on click fraud.

5. Some time later, author gets an email from Wikipedia saying his "talk page" had been created and changed. When he clicks through, he is shown what changes were made, and they are a suggestion by one of the participants in the debate on deletion that his comments will not be read on the archive page, and yet another link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review which, again, explains Wikipedia's deletion review policies, and offers a pretty clear six step process for having a deletion reviewed.

6. Instead of following this link, he clicks through the link in the email that told him how to get in contact with the person that edited his "talk page."

7. It clicks him through to a page that it then tells him not to touch. That's really annoying, but it immediately gives him the link to the place to talk to him in the same place.

8. He rages at this user about being asked to go through "some arcane cryptic obscure Wikipedia deletion review process," and asks why this user didn't just do it for him. He tells this Wikipedia editor that the decision to delete Stricchiola's article came from "the insane closed little world of Wikipedia editors, where non-specialist editors pretend to be experts on what’s notable[...]", and refers to his general feeling that "contributing anything to Wikipedia is a big giant waste of time[...]"

I don't know much about Wikipedia, and don't care whether Stricchiola is notable or not, or included or not, except in the general sense that I support the mission of Wikipedia and find it useful, and I hope that they at least keep it as useful as it has been, or make it even more useful. I want friction in my crowd-sourced encyclopedia, and know that it is far less friction than would occur in the World Book, where the appeal process would be far more obscure, and far less democratic. The deletion review process seemed pretty clear and quick to me. There was a lot of copying and pasting involved, it would be nice to have a button for that, but I'm not sure that the free form nature of the debate on the deletion page lends itself well to one. I consider this a flaw in the deletion page, not a reason not to simplify the process, but there is something to say in having a bit of friction in a process to reopen a debate that had already been concluded.

The sense of entitlement in this blog entry astounds me. I'm really surprised that so many people sympathize.

---

edit: I did skip the conclusion. In the end, he does go to the "deletion review" page. Instead of following the six step process (and notably not including a screenshot of that in his blog entry), he decides that it's the wrong page, and instead finds another page with a banner on top that begins: "Please note that this page is NOT for challenging the outcome of deletion discussions[...]"

More righteous condemnation ensues.

He did quite a lot (i.e. Tried to follow instructions) but was effectively sent to /dev/null. Regardless of whether the original article should be restored or not, I think this points out some interesting facts about how wikipedia works.

There is no form for pages that have been deleted. There is a page only (as best I can tell) for pages that are under consideration for being deleted. Once they are gone, they're gone -- unless they were removed for the ill-defined uncontroversial reasons.

Yes, I think that Wikipedia would welcome having subject expert barge right in when editors who are not subject experts are having a debate and looking for expert advice. I think they'd welcome that very much.

If you actually read the debate on the page I've written about, you'll see the editors don't understand the space that well, cannot find citations to prove or disprove what they're arguing about and in the end someone declares that the lack of an agreement is a consensus.

When I get alerted to this, and I'm trying to share detailed reference based on both first-hand knowledge as well as third-hand resources to actually help them make a decision, there is simply no easy way to do this, not unless I want to spend hours figuring out the insider mechanism to Wikipedia.

That's simply not how it should work. That is a massive Wikipedia failure, that actual expect on a subject cannot easily contribute.

If Wikipedia is designed only to have experts on Wikipedia contribute, then it will continue to succeed as a successful summary of non-expert guesswork.

I think, however, it is more than reasonable that those who are involved in the system take a hard look at how many barriers they've erected and whether the bureaucratic system that has come up couldn't be made more user friendly.

But hey, the next time you register a car at the DMV, and you've got to go from one window to the next, maybe you'll think no, it's your fault for being upset -- that's just the way the DMV works, and you're to blame for not having studied the bureaucracy better.

Many many many people have had these types of problems with Wikipedia. This isn't an "everybody else" problem, this is a Wikipedia problem. Wikipedia is a success, but it does have serious flaws in the bureaucracies of how it deals with contributors and new content.

> If this person had been allowed to just barge in and trample Wikipedia's policies on who is notable, despite having zero knowledge of how Wikipedia works, that would have been a Wikipedia failure.

Ok, I'll bite. Why would Wikipedia have failed?

Wikipedia policies exist to facilitate user contributions, not the other way around. Wikipedia itself says as much: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules

This is not about entitlement. This is about Wikipedia raising ridiculous bureaucratic barriers to people making good faith contributions of knowledge. In so doing, it undermines its basic mission.

Should I take this to mean that the merits of the article in question are secondary to Wikipedia's processes?

Here's (effectively) a first-time user trying to make sense of the process of Wikipedia--this should be a great time for introspection about how to make it more usable (especially when pestering the users for money!).

So--perhaps--it might be worth it to do something other than dismiss his complaint?

Half an hour? You cannot be serious?

that's kind of the point. the author tried to figure out how wikipedia works. they couldn't figure anything out because, as far as i can tell, all wikipedia documentation is designed to scare away anybody who isn't already an established wikipedia editor.

Providing the sum of all human knowledge, for free, to the entire world, however, might be better served by making Wikipedia's software and editing processes more accessible and usable to others.

My coworkers all got together a few years ago to create a gag article about another coworker as a practical joke. We built a web of subtle edits to associate our friend with some German rock band, a type of haircut, and a bunch of other things.

We eventually got our article up, and there it sat for about a month. Some wikipedia person figured it out, though, and unraveled the whole network of references in a few hours.

See, from the outside, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. And there's a community there to write an encyclopedia. Sensible, no?

Actually, the community comes first and the encyclopedia is a side-effect. The community functions very politically, and very much like a game as well. The original intention might have been an encyclopedia with the minimum number of rules necessary to make that successful, but ultimately, the rules and red tape turned into the fun part of the game, and the encyclopedia-writing is just the grinding bit.

If all you wanted was a huge encyclopedia unlimited by the constraints of physical book size, you'd have a deletion policy like this: "each statement of fact has to be cited from a reliable source, every article has to be composed entirely of statements of fact, any other content should be deleted". So if there are no reliably-sourced statements of fact about a given subject, you don't get an article about them. If I started a Wikipedia article about my neighbor's cat and wrote a lot of outrageous claims, they would all be deleted and we'd be left with a blank article, which would probably be deleted as a relatively boring matter of procedure.

But what fun is that, when we can have a concept like "notability"? Ah! Suddenly, instead of all that boring shit about citing facts and removing uncited content, and just keeping whatever reliable information we have about something, we can have a massive PvE game where you get to find articles about subjects you don't care about and declare "this isn't notable!", and then you can lawyer a "consensus" of other players into agreeing with you. Or if another player disagrees, suddenly you have a massive PvP battle! Fun! Well, at least for a certain type of person who enjoys lawyering and gets off on will-to-power stuff that motivates one to try and delete articles from an encyclopedia, which is exactly the type of person that gravitates towards the project. And--believe it or not--these kinds of highly-social games, and one's success in them on Wikipedia, are a major factor in getting elected "administrator", at which point your duties now entail judging these lawyering games and actually deleting the articles!

In this particular case, it was quite clear this person existed and that she worked in SEM. There were plenty of sources to back that up. That should be the relevant criterion for whether an article can exist in an Internet-based encyclopedia. There was no reason to delete this article other than "Ha ha, I know the rules of this bizarre system and will throw W:PDQXYZ links at you until you go away".

I've been through the AfD process 30 to 40 times myself. I normally don't see it because I spend most of my time on vandal patrol where I've contributed code and countless hours to that effort over the last 5 years. Most of my deletes are speedy deletes for vandalism and not notability except where it's clear and someone is trying to make wikipedia their personal homepage. It's a massive multi-gigabyte site and it takes a lot work to maintain it. That's why admin's have an icon of a broom.

I've seen this same type blog post all over the place. Someone burt hurt around an AfD. I've seen full campaigns to try and tarnish Wikipedia as having some kind of secret underground conspiracy against another group. It really doesn't work like that. You see that quickly if you get really involved in the site.

You are overestimating your average hacker news reader.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized."

I can put together a well-sourced piece outlining the importance of a variety of subjects which i am indirectly involved in, and give a dispassionate description of its relevance to the community it serves and the world at large.

Wikipedians, instead of saying "do that and have neutral 3rd parties check over your work", instead say "we do not value your contribution, and will delete your work".

As such, wikipedia isn't a place where knowledgeable people can contribute matters of expertise. And that really freaking annoys me.

Concrete example: The Knight Foundation's wikipedia page is incredibly sparse, and contains little or no information about the efforts they fund, or the substance of the work they do. This is unfortunate, because the foundation has been around for decades, is an integral piece of newspaper and journalism history, and currently funds a massive amount of the innovation taking place in journalism, including the project i work on, DocumentCloud (which the Knight Foundation entirely funded).

But, by the rules of Wikipedia, i shouldn't contribute to the subject. Meanwhile, there are plenty of startups and essentially irrelevant companies that already disregard the rules and write their own freaking wikipedia pages anyway. That's ultimately the real problem. Wikipedia is so capricious in the enforcement of the rules, and there's so little stopping people from breaking the rules, that deletions do seem arbitrarily and inconsistently enforced. I'm entirely unsurprised that there are so many cries of "injustice!" so often.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_hampton

It was deleted because of systematic racism in Wikipedia's notability policies.

I am against those policie not because of this article, but because of all those which have been deleted on similar grounds which I will never know about.

Do you have the same disappoval of me and my beliefs that you seem I have for the OP?

Besides, I thoroughly believe that Wikipedia should allow far more articles in, and people can make their own decisions whether to read them or not.

I imagine the deletionism of wikipedia comes from the fact that it is very hard to pay the bills. But in my opinion, every piece of information (yes, even pages about fictional furry characters which clearly state that they are fictional and their context) should be preserved.

However, I think wikipedia in its current structure falls short to achieve such objective. A "distributed wikipedia" (where everybody can contribute disk space) would be the the natural step IMO.

Three things I will add to the current wikipedia 1. Distributed storage, process. 2. Completely avoid deletionism 3. Use Article rating (there is some rating going on, but no straightforward way to use it [like filtering pages with less than 4 stars).

MediaWiki is open source BTW. I would do this if I could, but alas, my UI skills are not quite there. Are there any sharp UI designers who want to do this? It would be a hell of an addition to one's resume, not to mention the world :)

Personal user styles and javascripts are even stored as wiki-pages. We use Wikipages as IPC for bots and users. We use Wikipages for user messaging. I mean it's everywhere. User's get used to it and can figure out wikisyntax through the site and it's easy.

For it to get added as a special page, it has rise to a general enough thing to be needed by everyone using Mediawiki or something so pressing that could never or should never be on a Wikipage. Meta concepts usually only fit that (like permissions and stats and new page reviewing).

(although; I agree, improvements to certain processes would be very handy)

That assumes that it would be beneficial to have people who don't understand anything about what makes an article worth keeping making requests like that.

It also assumes that requesting deletion review is Wikipedia's most valuable place to spend developer and designer time.

Neither is true.

If a lengthy discussion has already reached conclusion on a matter, having someone jump through a few hoops and provide a good reason to reopen that debate doesn't seem unreasonable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia

(And it's on Wikipedia itself, natch.)

It's both. HN is unfriendly to new users who are used to the kind of interactions that predominate elsewhere. It is in many ways a close reddit analogue, and yet even veteran redditors will find themselves downvoted to oblivion here. I certainly did, when I first signed up.

Like HN, Wikipedia requires getting used to. There is a "Wikipedia Way", which is very different from how people interact on other parts of the Internet. It can seem bureaucratic and neurotic, and it is, but it keeps things running relatively smoothly for the regulars, which is the important part. The people who take the time to learn the ropes are the ones who end up ensuring that the content is useful and informative. Yes, some people will be put off by the fact that only reliable secondary sources can be considered when determining the notability of a subject, but the restriction is there for a reason: it keeps the crap out.

None of this means that Wikipedia is not open. If you waltzed into the Linux dev channel and insisted that something be done a certain way, you'd be banned. Linux is similarly complex, and there is a "Linux Way" of doing things. Take the time to learn that way and contribute, and you'll be welcomed. Insist they're wrong and write blog posts about how wrong they are, and you'll be ignored.

There was a nearly complete effort to rewrite talk pages: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads But it turned out to have atrocious performance, and the few times I used talk pages on wikis with it enabled, I wished they really hadn't enabled it.

So a standard discussion system really only benefits people who aren't smart or who aren't willing to put in a little time. But in making it easier for clueless noobs to express their opinions, will that help Wikipedia? Or will it hurt it by soaking up the time of people who do know what they're doing?

As an example, consider Danny Sullivan's experience. If it had been easier for him to kick off a deletion review, he would have done it. But that would have been a waste of time, as he didn't have anything to say that would have changed the outcome. And that's true because he wasn't willing to take any time to understand what was going on.

Or as another example, consider YouTube comments. How does it help Wikipedia to make it easier to let those people comment?

Wikipedia avoids original research for a very good reason: to keep out physics cranks and the like, who would infest WP otherwise.

Now, we all know a Wikipedia page doesn't have the weight of other sources and can be crap at times but so far it's a total class act and it has a lot to do with these policies.

I'm sure you know that Wikipedia has to constantly police itself for large companies trying to mess with competitor's pages and how there are armies of political operatives out there trying to rewrite history through Wikipedia. This is why even experts like the OP are so scrutinized.

I would question, though, whether that's particular to Wikipedia. You should take everything you read with a colossal grain of salt. Even if it's written in a printed encyclopedia, a textbook, or an article.

Even wikipedia suggests you don't cite them, but use the cites given in the article.

That's why good quality citations are so important.

I have tools that help me help new users out quick in my dashboard. It's part of what I do. No body should feel afraid to edit Wikipedia. Ever. It's a public resource.

> Given the extensive list of sources covering this individual above, please explain exactly how the subject does not meet Wikipedia's notability criteria. If others agree, the tag can be restored - but you cannot tag an article that meets the criteria simply because you don't like them. --Jezebel'sPonyo

And the tag has been removed.

You also get a whole lot of stupid politics, wasted energy, process wanking, flamewars, and acronym-laden cryptic discourses where words like "arbitration" have strange, Orwellian connotations. ("Arbitration" is Wikipedia's name for the process governing, among other things, removing administrator privileges and banning contributors for long periods of time.) Contributing to Wikipedia is a usability disaster because of all the red tape, process, policy, and other crap the core group of contributors has constructed.

But the project is big and popular enough, and the work is easy enough, that people still throw themselves into it. You start by just making a few small edits to something, or adding some sources and information to an article. Then it goes on a bit, and you learn some of the terminology and process, and you start feeling personally invested in it. I mean, it's Wikipedia! It has lots of information about everything! It's free! The human race needs something like this! Before you know it, you're in a "community" of core contributors. There are people with impressive titles like "arbitrator", "administrator", "bureaucrat". You start playing status games. You worry about your edit count. You try to get an article up to "featured article" status. You network. You try not to make enemies. You try to sound wise on "Articles for Deletion", or the "Administrator's Noticeboard", or a million different talk pages. Eventually someone nominates you for administrator. You answer a few questions and other contributors vote for you. Let's assume you played politics well enough leading up to this point. You win! Now in addition to all the crap you were doing before, you get to play with your administrator tools as well. Fun, eh? Well, for some people it is. But at that level, Wikipedia is 90% politics. There's an awesome encyclopedia there for sure, but man, you don't want to see how the sausage is made.

http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page

1) If it's supposed to be the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit", then it should be easy to use. If the "anyone can edit" is marred by insane levels of bureaucracy, making it so that, technically anyone can edit, but realistically, only those who know how to game the system can edit, than the system as a whole is a partial failure.

2) Who are you to judge whether he's an expert? Given that he at least claims to work in the field, that makes him more of an expert than almost all of the wikipedia editors combined. They just know their own bureaucratic guidelines, he actually knows something about the article in discussion. In the interest of journalistic integrity, they should at least attempt to listen to his points.

3) His points about how difficult it is to contest something is completely spot-on. There's no good reason why all the "contest this" or "discuss that" pages are simply huge text pages, other than because no one gave them a proper UI. For new users, it's confusing as heck. Given the status wikipedia has nowadays, and how widely it's used, they simply can't expect every user to know or care about their arcane systems. The system needs a proper UI for these sorts of things, making it easy to (a) file a complaint, (b) find a previously filed complaint, (c) discuss the complaint, and (d) find the resolution. His story about wading through talk pages isn't unusual, and it's kind of shameful for wikipedia that they haven't made it easier to use since their inception.

The problem with Wikipedia is rather than consistency they go with, "who got here first and what is a large majority of the article written in? (British?, American?). All the other pages on color all use American English but apparently someone using British English got to Orange first. It's a huge mess but I suppose it doesn't matter since no one types in disambiguated names.

The problem with Wikipedia is its a very large bureaucracy, and the culture of Wikipedia seems to weigh heavier on confirming from 3rd party sources that a person is "notable"

What's confusing is that Wikipedia also wants to "welcome" anonymous edits, which leads to huge problems with vandalism, but editing Wikipedia has a high learning curve.

I'll soon be launching a reference site called Thunkpedia which loosens the 'encyclopedic' standard, but adds other constraints in its place.

There's a video about my motivations, and a sneak peek of its interface, at http://thunkpedia.org. More discussion is at the project blog, http://infinithree.org (from the original codename).

That treatment was six people casting "delete" votes, which did not succeed. That's one hell of a small tolerance you have for disagreement.

Your post is a little like saying "I won't go to New York City any more because a few people posted on Yelp that they didn't like this one restaurant I enjoyed going to."

People create articles all the time about their recently deceased grandfather who was an ordinary soldier in WW2. These usually get deleted unless the person was otherwise noteable.

If I request that such a "grandfather" article is deleted it is not cause I hate your grandfather or want to hurt you. It is just that there were millions of other ordinary soldiers in WW2 so your granddad wasn't anybody special in history even if he was special to you.