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Comment by matznerd | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree! I updated something on my father's wikipedia page (he founded a city and was a mayor), and even though the article was 5 years old, the change brought the article under review and it was cited for deletion due to notability! I countered everyone of their arguments with sourced articles directly that met the guidelines for notability and they just deleted the messages from their talk pages. They eventually stopped responding and left the article for deletion. Luckily a compassionate editor came along (who happened to be female) and completely defended it and me.

edit: I just searched for the page and it is deleted! I am going to get to the bottom of this, this is ridiculous, who do these people think they are?

edit 2: When the editor apologized to me, she told me to notify her if the page was ever deleted "If the article gets deleted, please let me know. -- Uzma Gamal". I've sent her a message and will update...This is crazy!

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For reasons like these, whenever I see "please give me money" Wikipedia commercials, I just say yea....Nope!!

It's pretty ridiculous that people will go this far out of their way to delete an article that is obviously not spam or anything like that. Seriously, I got pretty emotional having to defend my father's notability to a stranger on the internet who is on a power-trip. At least the woman standing up for me (and my Dad) proves there are at least some good people on there...

They've gone and deleted the page on Atomic Dielectric Resonance Scanning as well, seemingly on the basis that the page was made by the son of the guy who invented the technology.

The fact that you are so emotionally invested in the subject is a good reason why you shouldn't be the one writing or creating the article in the first place.

It also tends to lead to distorted understandings of the problems in these kinds of discussions, imo. There are a lot of things that can be improved on Wikipedia, but they are not most clearly seen if your only interaction with Wikipedia is writing articles where you have a strong conflict of interest. You get a better idea of what's good and bad if you put in a good-faith effort to contribute to articles that don't relate to your own business/self/family/books first, and see how that goes. It's not even strictly prohibited to work on articles where you have a conflict of interest, but it's not a good place to start. I find that many people who dismiss Wikipedia entirely didn't ever make that good-faith effort to understand and contribute. I chatted at a conference with a professor who had very strong opinions on Wikipedia and appeared to be positioning himself as very knowledgeable about it... based on his one and only effort to edit it, creating an article about himself.

> I find that many people who dismiss Wikipedia entirely didn't ever make that good-faith effort to understand and contribute.

I find many people people who dismiss wikipedia entirely did make that good faith effort to understand and contribute.

They gave up after

- writing articles (with sources) about early 20th C Olympic athletes which were bulk deleted as not notable

- making small changes to articles to fix spelling, grammar, or style. Each change required extensive reading of the MoS to get right. Almost every change was reverted within minutes to the previous version by someone using twinkle, or some auto revert tool, or someone with an image of a police-officer style "vandal patrol". (Some of the fixes were clearly fixes from something incorrect to correct. A few of them were matters of style, bringing things into compliance with the MoS, or making something consistent with the rest of the page.) Worse than having the changes reverted was to sometimes have a warning templated to their talk page.

- the hatred for people who edit without making accounts.

- a bizarre process of user name review after the username was deemed "confusing". (Note the software has hard coded limits on what can become a username; further there are a bunch of filters to prevent certain words being used). The username was not similar to any wikipedian username, nor to any function or process of wikipedia, nor to any kid of role account (real or otherwise.) What could the name be confused with? This, coupled with hatred for IP editing, lead to death.

So, now, we both have our anecdotes about people who've had poor experiences with wikipedia.

Yours is interesting. Creating an article about yourself is clearly a bad idea. But how did his experience end up with him hating wikipedia, and not being pleased that wikipedia has strong process in place to prevent odd biases? Why is it acceptable to chase off expert users just because they've made a mistake? Why do you assume he made no good faith effort to contribute, and not that he made a mistake, and tried to contribute, and got chased off by over vigorous editors.

On the latter point, because I chatted with him over dinner, and as far as I could tell the only thing he really cared about was that he "should" have a Wikipedia article and they wouldn't "let" him have one. I've had quite a few experiences with academics (I'm also an academic) who seem to be primarily interested in how they can get Wikipedia to cover them or their work, i.e. their main goal is to use it to get their work more well known or highly cited. Not as much interest in how Wikipedia is as a quality encyclopedia in general.

When I would suggest that it might be better to start editing in some other area not directly theirs, for example start with important classic theorems in theoretical CS, and that kind of thing, the response was a less direct version of: I have more important things to do than write random articles for free, and anyway there are already good textbooks that cover those theorems.

(Not all my experiences with academics are bad in that regard, but I've found that, partly due to academic incentives, most just don't have the time/interest to write something that doesn't contribute to their career advancement. There are definite exceptions, though, especially among profs with the luxury of already being tenured.)

Okay, that's fair enough.

One thing that is really good is the much better way that WP tries to engage with college projects.

Sometimes a lecturer will have an idea to get students to edit WP. This used to end badly for all concerned. WP now has much nicer ways to meet new editors, and encourage them into better ways of editing.

"" When I would suggest that it might be better to start editing in some other area not directly theirs ""

Every hair on Buffy Summer's head has an article on Wikipedia. The above is not going to create a better encyclopedia, it is going to create an elitist, insular clique.

The only people who are going to write articles for free are going to be emotionally invested in the topic. Otherwise there's no payoff for them.

Editors on the other hand, have a very simple payoff: power.

There are different, less self-interested kinds of emotional investment, though. Many article authors are intellectually interested in their subjects, but not personally connected to them. For example, there's a difference between writing a Wikipedia article on a mathematical theorem you consider beautiful and important; and writing a Wikipedia article on a mathematical theorem that you personally discovered and published. In both cases you care a lot about the subject, but in the second case it may be better to let a third party who's less personally close to it write the article.

(Interestingly, this almost never comes up in the mathematics articles. There are quite a few mathematicians who edit Wikipedia, and they tend to be quite scrupulous about that kind of thing.)

I wonder how far Linux would have gotten without people contributing to "scratch their own itch".

Self-interest is something to be harnessed and channeled to promote a greater good (better kernel code, more article contributions), not something to be chased away.

I would argue many of the editors are as emotionally attached to the control they have over articles as well, if not the subject as well.

The issue is that without paying people, you aren't going to get a lot of people who aren't emotionally invested to bother contributing the Wikipedia.

Irrelevant, WP has a mechanism where biased articles eventually reach an unbiased state.

Who else is going to rally against the people that view Wikipedia as their own personal Bonsai?

That is a very good reason not to donate. I wonder if there is an organized campaign to fix the overzealous deletion problem (by changing the "notability" policy), to boycott as long as it remains and pledge to donate if it is changed to a more objective policy.

Well, if Wikipedia didn't have any money at all, there would be no articles whatsoever. Wouldn't that be worse?

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