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Comment by jQueryIsAwesome | Hacker News Reader

Its a noise to signal ratio problem; when you search for any person you don't want a list of one thousand people; you probably want to read about the few popularly know ones. Same thing happens with acronyms, dates and abbreviations.

Plus the big problem of sources curation, those are more unreliable in unpopular articles for the lack of eyeballs on them. The amount of work mods have to do would grow exponentially if they didn't take notability into account.

Of course Wikipedia could do better, but it is a hard problem, not an easy one.

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> Its a noise to signal ratio problem; when you search for any person you don't want a list of one thousand people; you probably want to read about the few popularly know ones. Same thing happens with acronyms, dates and abbreviations.

Just recently (only last century) some clever fellows came up with a workable solution for this. Look up www.google.com in your web browser and see if works for you.

They came out for a solution for themselves, or do you happen to have the link to their github repo? Otherwise you may want to donate a few million dollars so they can come out with a similar solution.

Sarcasm doesn't work like it used to.

My point

Wikipedia is an "encyclopedia anyone can edit".

Google aims to "index all the world's information".

These are different but complementary goals.

That the Wikimedia Foundation hasn't improved a user interface that was slapped together in the early 2000s is not somehow a mathematical, universal constraint on the growth of the subjects that are covered. It just isn't.

I am prepared to bet honest folding money that almost nobody uses the internal mechanisms of search and navigation that Wikipedia provides. Apart from clicking an in-text link referring to another subject, I am prepared to bet that traffic to Wikipedia is dominated by search engine referrals by at least one order of magnitude. Probably two.

Google so dominates the actual usage of Wikipedia that it is ridiculous to advance the poor UI of the Wikipedia platform as some kind of serious argument in favour of deletionism.

It'd be like walking into a library circa 1950 and saying "All these index cards are a schlep, let's start throwing away books".

You'd be committed to a loony bin. And now we have unlimited search and retrieval capability and you suppose that a poor interface is the killer blow for deletionism?

I believe I am having a Mugatu Moment here.

"Use google please, our searching and listing algorithm is not as good as theirs".

Most people don't return to Google after the initial access to the website, they keep using the Wikipedia interface when they need to search related subjects.

And I will surely throw away some books from the library if random people were allowed to put their books in there.

And the killer blow is the second part.

... huh?

Edit: since you added this --

> Most people don't return to Google after the initial access to the website, they keep using the Wikipedia interface when they need to search related subjects.

I'll bet you $100, AUD or USD, to be donated to the charity of your choice, that this is not so, by a factor of at least 10 to 1.

As I said, this does not include following links in articles. I am talking about the wikipedia search engine and category pages. I am talking about search engines generally, though I expect google to be the dominant one.

I will gladly accept the bet if you can find a trustful way of getting that data, because honestly I can't think about one.

And you overall do have a point, but is not as strong as you think it is.

How are you so sure most people don't return to Google? I do it more than half the time, and just add Wikipedia as a search term to narrow the results. For years I've felt it made my search more fruitful than using Wikipedia's search. Maybe my feelings are wrong, but if I feel this way, then a lot of other people could, too!

You can tell from auto-complete many people add 'wiki' or 'wikipedia' to searches at Google. And with the growth of Google-search-from-browser fields, I would also strongly expect that most people who type reformulated queries during an extended Wikipedia session do so through Google, not Wikipedia's much weaker onsite search.

A little test show otherwise: http://imgur.com/hBuzt (Unlogged-in / Cookieless)

Perhaps is related to the kind of subjects you are searching for; or it may just personalization by google.

Or maybe we are both biased for ultimately silly reasons and the truth lies somewhere in the middle but the lack of available data reduces everything to mere speculation.

This 'little test' on 3 arbitrary early-20th-century historical names, only looking at the top 4 suggestions, doesn't 'show otherwise'. I said 'many people', not 'most'.

Turn off 'instant' so you see the top 10 autocompletions, and watch over all your queries. You will very often see "wiki" as a suggested suffix.

Or better yet, just add " w" to the end of any of your own tests: " wiki" will be the top suggestion, which demonstrates that 'many' people add it as a suffix on Google.

Everything on this question is not reduced to bias and 'mere speculation'. I've observed many peoples' search behavior, not just my own, and habitual recourse to browser-based search boxes or always-requery-at-Google is growing over time (especially with the rise of Chrome and its 'onebox').

Wikipedia also did usability studies in the 2009-2010 timeframe, from which Wikimedia director/developer Erik Moeller reported: "our test subjects tended to resort to common web search engines to navigate Wikipedia instead of using the site’s own search" [1]. (Wikipedia has since moved the site search box to help it be found, and I suspect that's boosted its use, but it's still subtle compared to the always-available, always-familiar in-browser Google-powered search.)

[1] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/06/15/usability-why-did-we-mo...

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aen.wikipedia.org+hack...

Maybe you didn't intend this but it sounds like you are saying that Popularity == Notability. I don't think that's a helpful stance to take. Especially since as time progresses, older things will generally become less popular and thus trend towards deletion if what you say is true.

There is way too many people writing everyday in Wikipedia for time degradation to be a viable solution, plus it doesn't do anything for the problem of source curation.

My point was that it sounded like you were basically saying that only popular articles should be allowed on Wikipedia, regardless of whether that meant anything older than a few years old should be deleted. Since I don't agree, I was pointing that out.

I guess it helps if your an anime character.

Between anime and pop music I am not sure which has more pages dedicated to it. You can find page after page about individual episodes of an anime series just as you can find many individual pages for one song off an album.

So what quantifies notability? I would love to know how an obscure; at least to me; anime or song qualifies versus some of what does get deleted.

The bias of individuals play a major role in the historical and biographical accuracy of the articles they write, not so much in obscure songs. Also the credibility reduction in the public eyes is virtually none for mistakes in such things as obscure songs.

Yep, those are the two arguments for notability criteria I found most convincing. Anybody arguing for total inclusionism will have have to provide answers to those. And if you're not arguing for total inclusionism, you need to provide better notability criteria that work with all the edge cases. That's also really really hard.

As someone who recently imported Wikipedia information for a project, it's trivially easy to determine notability, either by monthly pageviews (publicly available), or by incoming links within Wikipedia.

As long as articles always take popularity into account when ranking (in searches, etc.) there isn't any problem.

The bigger problem is verifiability via citations to third-party sources, not really notability. If you can cite a good reference, in some kind of scholarly or otherwise decent source, and not written by the actual subject of the article, it typically stays in. I've written articles on some very obscure things, but they were well-cited, so nobody challenged them. My usual methodology is actually to start from a good source: pick up a book like Knuth's TAOCP, find algorithms he discusses that have no article, do a little searching to find a 2nd or 3rd source on the algorithm, then write a little article cited to those 2-3 sources. Haven't run into any problems doing things that way.

There didn't used to be as much emphasis on citations, but a mixture of hoaxes, libel controversies, and an influx of fringe-physics people led to a significant clampdown on unverified material around 2005-06. The good side of it is that the previous focus on notability is mostly gone: if you have good sources, it's ipso-facto notable, due to having, in fact, been noted in good sources. This is quite nice when I write articles on obscure subjects which will get only a handful of visits, but which are well-referenced. The downside is that subjects which are notable but for which there isn't good material to cite end up in an awkward place. I wrote a bit on that shift last year: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...

In fact, you can provide citations which don't actually say what you are using them for (or say what you want while totally failing to substantiate it in any way) and it tends to work as long as the group of people who camp that particular article agree with your editorial slant on the matter.

I'm always chasing down citations on wikipedia and finding this to be the case.

That's definitely something worth chasing down. I haven't found it in the articles I edit, but I guess I tend to avoid editing articles where people have axes to grind (Israel-Palestine, U.S. politics, climate-change, alternative medicine, that kind of thing).

I do sometimes find misreferences, but in the areas I edit (archaeology, geography, engineering, history) they're most often misreads or misinterpretations by someone who was reading either too carelessly or without enough background.

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