Deletionists slowing Wikipedia's growth | Hacker News Reader

Deletionists slowing Wikipedia's growth

guardian.co.uk

49 pointsboredguy885 comments

Currently the entries for Hacker News, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell are all flagged as insufficiently notable:

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

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

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

Trevor's entry is a particularly interesting case of the pathology. Originally his bio talked about how he'd made the first dynamically balancing biped robot. That set off a firestorm about priority. One nutter got so mad that for a while Trevor's bio read as if the most significant thing about him was that he'd falsely claimed to have made the first dynamically balancing biped. Eventually the Wikipedians solved the problem by deletion, so now his bio simply says he's some guy who builds robots. Which of course wouldn't be notable, if that's all he was.

I'm inclined to agree that they are not "generally notable"

The entire HN entry is 4 sentences long. All of the footnotes are sourced from either blogs or YC itself. If HN must be included in Wikipedia, it's probably more appropriate as a mention in the YC page.

The individuals are in the same boat. All the references about Trevor are either from his own site or his company site. The footnotes for Jessica are largely sourced from blogs and videos.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of general information. The fact that they are involved with YC or have a company that builds robots is not inherently notable or of general interest.

So, the question remains, how is the fact that those articles are on wikipedia harming you in any way?

Even before this article came up, I've searched for and read those articles, and found them helpful. It provides a succinct overview of the individuals, with links if you want to pursue futher. What difference does it make where the links are sourced from?

And who determines what 'general interest' is? It's of general interest to me!

There is the possibility of analysis paralysis. In the extreme case where everyone had a Wiki page, an individual's name might return 100+ different results.

I would have to say I am in the inclusionists camp though. If someone took the time to create an article for some obscure topic, then they find it worthy enough to share meaning that most likely someone else out there would also be interested in the topic.

Spend some time patrolling AfD, and I bet you will lose that opinion quickly. You may not become a deletionist, but you will stop believing topics are worthwhile simply because "someone took the time to create an article". The sheer volume of dross people pump into WP every day is staggering.

If there's no reliable sources, what happens when somebody adds lies (whether intentionally or not)?

Well you see paper is expensive and shelf space is even more expensive. How does this matter to wikipedia you ask? Well imagine a website trying very hard to be like a book, I don't mean the ideas therein, I mean the physical limitations - Wikipedia!

Well, Wikipedia determines this by setting their notability guidelines.

At the end of the day, it's up to each individual community to determine what is and is not appropriate. It wouldn't hurt you if somebody started posting celebrity gossip articles on HN, but HN would probably downvote them into oblivion because it has decided those types of articles are not relevant to this community. I can say with a high degree of certainty that you would not object to this practice. With Wikipedia it's the same principle.

Not the same though - in HN the rest of the community would be affected by celeb gossip links because we'd have to look at them on the main page.

But who really cares if these pages exist on Wikipedia? It's not as if you have to even see that they exist, much less actively ignore them.

But who really cares if these pages exist on Wikipedia?

Would it affect the speed of serving up the more desired pages? My heart is with the inclusionists, but would Wikipedia be as easy and as fun to use if its database size were much larger for the same budget?

Except the notability guideline is at odds with the stated goal of Wikipedia -- to collect and provide the totality of human knowledge, for free.

Far better would be to do away with the notability guideline entirely. The purpose it allegedly serves is in keeping unverifiable (as in, cannot be confirmed by reference to reliable sources) information out of Wikipedia, but Wikipedia already has two full-blown and actively-used policies regarding that matter. All that's left for notability, then, is to turn Wikipedia articles into popularity contests, something that's definitely at odds with its stated goals.

You might be right, but I think you confused Wikipedia's goal with Google's.

I looked (casually) and did not find anything on Wikipedia that said its goal was "to collect and provide the totality of human knowledge, for free."

There's a whole huge article on Wikipedia that contradicts this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ISNOT

Well, technically it's the goal of the Wikimedia Foundation in general, rather than the Wikipedia project in particular.

See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home which states:

"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."

It's clearly not the goal of Wikipedia itself.

How are these brief entries any less important than descriptions of the complete episodes of BSG, Doctor Who, The Wire, or dozens of other TV shows? Yes, I've read many of those episode articles and I'm sure they get more hits, but we're talking about making information available to anyone who might needs it. Who can say this is needed, this is not?

It seems odd that a real person can't get an entry but there are probably thousands of fictional characters written up.

That may be, but you have to admit that there are thousands of fictional characters with larger impact on our world than the majority of real persons...

You're really arguing not about whether topics should be included in the encyclopedia, but how their articles should be organized. Your argument is placated by reorganizing The Wire into one big article with all the detail from every episode. But the article was broken up not because of some separate notability for each episode (though some of them clearly are, ahem, notably notable), but because it makes WP's coverage of The Wire easier to read.

I don't think his argument is "placated" by that at all -- the point remains that lots of minutiae are apparently deemed worthy of inclusion, while arguably significant real-world people or organizations (which in many cases meet the letter of the law for notability) are not. The "notability" standard is applied very inconsistently, and in a way that seems to boil down to "whatever the Wikipedia brass find interesting." If that's the standard, fine, but be honest about it.

Again, a canard. Notability is far less subjective than it's made out to be. What episode of The Wire hasn't been written about in a reliable source somewhere? Zero, is how many.

Further, WP accomodates a myriad of non-notable facts. They're simply attached to notable subjects. The idea that every single sentence in WP must be notable is a straw-man argument. Once you accept that The Wire is notable enough for inclusion in WP, by nature of being the single best piece of long-form televisual drama ever created, then the question of how its articles are organized stops being about notability and starts being about information design.

And, I mean, have at it and all. But don't make it something that it isn't.

tptacek in 3, 2, 1...

You're mean.

Sometimes my timing is impeccable.

Bio's of people have always been contentious on Wikipedia - especially in the realms of what is or is not notable.

I think the current accepted theory is that you ask the question: if I googled their name could I get all of the information I want from one pre-existing (non WP) link. If the answer is yes then in most cases there is no need for the article.

What if it takes 2 or 3 places to get all the information? Or 300 places that aren't the mainstream media? My problem with the current notability theory is that it isn't flexible enough for what should. For now, deletionists versus inclusionists isn't going to end, but the current notability policy could explicitly allow for the inclusion of articles with no mainstream media sources.

For example, I think every professor that has ever had an article published in Nature should have their own Wikipedia page. More professors than just that, but I don't think there is any argument against a scientist that is extremely respected in his field, even if no one in the mainstream media has decided he is worth mentioning left.

It is bad to depend on the mainstream media for what is notable because Wikipedia is already beyond that. I used the SFGate to establish notability on an article. Techcrunch has a better Alexa rank than the SF Gate, but Techcrunch doesn't count for some reason.

> What if it takes 2 or 3 places to get all the information? Or 300 places that aren't the mainstream media?

Exactly. In that case a Wikipedia article would be appropriate (I thought that was clear in my post, sorry)

In the example of Jessica Livingston this page: http://ycombinator.com/people.html provides all of the information found on wikipedia.

I flipped Hacker News back, notability is already established by the included references, as per Wikipedia rules. I've already had this argument on Wikipedia, but Wikipedia pages tend to unravel if you don't check them continuously.

For Trevor and Jessica: shouldn't any of the feature length magazine articles that name them as founders of Y Combinator be enough to establish notability?

I fixed the articles of Trevor and Jessica.

Web reach should be enough to trigger notability. Any website in the top 100,000 in terms of traffic for a year is important enough to merit Wikipedia attention.

Notability should be determined by how useful the knowledge is, not whether or not the mainstream press bothers to pay attention.

The level of notability should be set by Wikipedia's ability to reliably incorporate information, not by some arbitrary standard. As the number and expertise of editors increases, the notability standard should decrease.

The goal of wikipedia is the "sum of human knowledge," (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech) not to "the sum of human knowledge that has been covered in the mainstream press."

I had the Alexa rankings for Hacker News in there the last time I edited it, but a Wikipedia editor has deleted that reference in his or her infinite wisdom.

Sadly, I was talking more about the wikipedia I would like to see than about the wikipedia that currently exists.

Personally, number of people using something is a lot more meaningful to me than number of journalists writing about it. Of course, as a very occasional anonymous editor, I suppose I don't have much right to complain.

The rules for notability are straightforward. Subjects are notable "by dint of being written about". The notability tag is very easy to dispel: provide references to credible reliable sources. They clearly exist for Blackwell.

The misconception you're fostering here is that the {{Notability}} tag is somehow a black mark on the article. It isn't. The entire encyclopedia is under constant construction. The tags are there to direct the attention of editors.

Your complaint is particularly misleading because the Blackwell article is, in fact, badly sourced; it has "External links", but its "References" all point to Blackwell's own sites. The {{Notability}} tag is correct, not because Blackwell isn't notable (he again clearly is), but because the article doesn't properly establish why.

The rest of your critique may or may not be valid (I have misgivings about WP, too), but the main thrust of your comment here is bogus, and you should acknowledge that.

I don't think your argument holds up here, though. As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there are already Wikipedia policies in place which cover verifiability of information and citations to reliable sources (in fact, these criteria form part of one of Wikipedia's "Five Pillars").

And there are already perfectly useful procedures in place for dealing with articles which fail these criteria: there are tags for indicating that particular articles, sections or individual statements are in need of citation, and there's a process for evaluating sources referenced by articles.

Given this, the notability guideline seems at best to duplicate matters already covered by full-fledged policies. And in real-world situations, its main function seems to be turning Wikipedia into a popularity contest -- prove that your topic has enough Google juice, and it stays!

If your whole argument is that {{Notability}} should instead be {{refimprove}} (or whatever that tag was), then, fine, but I think my point holds.

My argument is really that the notability guideline in general serves no constructive purpose on Wikipedia; everything useful that it purports to do is covered by other policies or guidelines, which leaves only the non-useful things it does, like cause flamewars.

The notability guideline supports the non-negotiable verifiability principle. In the absence of WP:N, the amount of random content on WP rises. With it, the amount of difficult-to-verify content. With that, the amount of blatantly false content. The burden of weeding out that content falls on people who could otherwise be improving articles on subjects of note.

I think something people miss about WP is the fact that, at the end of the day, all the articles on this massive free volunteer project are published under an encyclopedia's masthead. It really is an actual encyclopedia. It's not the Internet. If something survives in WP, it's supposed to be good. The project is fundamentally opposed to bogus articles; in fact, the project is about not having bogus articles.

"In the absence of WP:N, the amount of random content on WP rises. With it, the amount of difficult-to-verify content."

Absolutely not. The difference would be as follows.

With the notability guideline, ten million monkeys bang on their keyboard:

"Delete, NN"

etc.

Without the notability guideline, the same ten million monkeys who are already reviewing these articles at least enough to type a brief vote in a discussion will bang out:

"Delete, not verifiable."

While the latter requires more keystrokes (and thus in aggregate represents significantly more effort on the part of the monkeys), it is otherwise not distinguishable in purpose or effect from the former. At least, it isn't distinguishable so long as WP:N is only used for articles which cannot be verified by referring to reliable sources (hint: that's a bad assumption to make).

That argument isn't just false, it's prima facie false.

In the WP:V case, some articles are stricken for being nonverifiable. Others are kept despite being nonnotable.

Wikipedia is now charged with the task of maintaining and article about Thomas Ptacek. That article is fine right after the AfD, of course. But 3 months later, it claims that Thomas Ptacek is the inventor of ketchup salt. Some WP volunteer has to catch that and scrub it out.

That overhead doesn't exist in the WP:N encyclopedia we have today, because a Thomas Ptacek article wouldn't survive AfD for notability reasons.

This problem is the whole point of WP:N.

"But 3 months later, it claims that Thomas Ptacek is the inventor of ketchup salt. Some WP volunteer has to catch that and scrub it out."

And with the notability criterion, lots of WP volunteers have to spend lots of time trawling AfD and typing "Delete, NN" over and over and over again. Meanwhile, unverifiable information pops up and must be removed from articles about notable subjects just as much as non-notable subjects.

So how, precisely, does Wikipedia save effort under this plan?

Or, more accurately, why do you believe that more effort is involved in:

"Nominated for deletion due to: not verifiable/does not cite sources"

than in:

"Nominated for deletion due to: not notable/does not assert notability"

In both cases, research must be done by multiple volunteers to assess the claim and come to a decision. But in one case the criterion is relatively objective; in the other it's an invitation to highly-subjective flamewars.

Because WP:N cordons off a whole huge swath of human knowledge and says WP doesn't have to bother keeping articles about it accurate; it can just be removed wholesale from the encyclopedia.

WP says, Pokemon yes, Thomas Ptacek no. Pikachu must be yellow, not green, but it doesn't matter if Thomas Ptacek invented ketchup salt, because WP doesn't have to cover it.

I feel like you're kind of having to go through contortions to avoid this fact, James.

I just don't really understand why another redundant label -- "not notable" -- is needed to express the underlying concept of "not verifiable".

With only a couple of narrow exceptions, lack of notability is not sufficient for speedy deletion by an administrator, which means that all those articles still take up time and consume the effort of editors who participate in the AfD. In other words, I doubt that there's enough of a saving of time and effort to justify the myriad other problems the notability criterion is known to generate.

And so it seems to me that it'd be far simpler to do away with the notability guideline and keep the focus on what it allegedly aims to accomplish: ensuring that information in Wikipedia can be verified by reference to reliable sources. If an article cites no sources to back up the information it presents, get rid of it unless/until someone comes up with suitable sources, and throw the politics and the popularity contests out of the process.

Deletionist rational that makes sense. "not having bogus articles" that one statement is causing me to seriously doubt my inclusionist position.

At what cost are you prepared to hold the "no bogus articles" line?

Some of the deletionists are very far into 'burning the village in order to save it' territory. I.e., they're so obsessed over "quality" that they'll snuff out anything that might even be the slightest bit questionable, erring on the side of removing things.

That strikes me as stupid and needlessly destructive. If bogus articles creep in, the solution is to correct them and move on.

The obsession over Wikipedia's "reputation" is likewise misguided. Unless the entire concept of "an encyclopedia anyone can edit" is abandoned, it's never going to be a totally reliable source, and users will always have to be cautioned to fact-check before depending on the information. Outside of the Wikipedia community, this is pretty much taken for granted.

The best compromise solution I can come up with would be to periodically 'fork' the WP articlebase, and let the deletionists go to town on the fork, honing it down into some subset of the working version, which users could then choose to browse if they wanted something with a slightly higher barrier to entry. However, my guess is that very few casual WP users actually care.

I don't think your logic holds. The fact that it's "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is why deletionism is a healthy force. If the deletionists let up, and WP spiraled out of control with vanity articles, it would likely stop being an encyclopedia anyone can edit.

Again, I think people personalize this. The good deletionists don't care about you or your subject. It's the project they're sticking up for, not the non-notability of Trevor Blackwell. When the topic of debate is Trevor Blackwell, they'll lose. When it's Ketchup_salt, they'll win.

There certainly are bad deletionists. A lot of them. But I don't think that's a symptom of deletionism. I think it's a symptom of editing-as-sport and status-seeking, and that those are the problems that are really poisoning WP.

Deletionism nudges the project power more towards those with "editing-as-sport and status-seeking" motivations. Procedural games are what they like.

For new and casual contributors, deletionism forces them to engage on topics they aren't passionate about -- older topics and wikipedia lawyering -- rather than the marginal topics they're excited to get started (and which may become rigorously 'notable' in due time). Some of these people will just be driven away.

I share your concern, but this is an argument that applies equally well to all of WP's process. It's orthogonal to deletionism.

'Orthogonal' is the strong claim I'm disputing; other WP process does not create the same problem. For example, editing someone's contribution to improve its voice/NPOV or suggest verification can encourage casual contributors; it's positive attention. "I got something started, others are paying attention, progress is occurring. Fun!"

Deletionism -- whether the judgment that something should be deleted or following through with deletion -- is negative attention. It uniquely discourages contributors and often destroys content of small-but-positive value. (For example, it destroys the important 'first drafts' of topics that will someday easily pass 'notability'.)

Deletionism also shrinks the territory on which collaboration can occur. A deleted article can be neither corrected nor improved; it is a void. Perhaps there is someone somewhere who could add the citations... justify the importance... benefit from the partial information -- but deletion forecloses that possibility, even though cheap storage and cheap search means incomplete scraps of information can better find their audience/editors than ever before.

Unfortunately "improving articles on subjects of note" (as well as arguing notability) requires more contentious editing/lawyering compared to "developing new articles on marginal topics". The lawyering is exciting for one kind of old-hand contributor -- but turns off many others.

So optimizing for "improving articles on subjects of note" may paradoxically serve to make total editor attention more scarce, and waste more of it on low-value disputes and incremental refinements. "Why bother," a newbie or loosely-attached casual contributor might ask, "when all these busybodies keep marking subjects of interest to me for deletion, and mangling prose with obsessive footnotes (or requests for same)?"

!#@!@^% deletionists are ruining Wikipedia. They'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

Wikipedia notability tag:

If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged or deleted.

How long does an article have to correct itself before the deletionists have their way with it? It seems to me that when plenty of reasonable people agree that someone is notable, and the problem is external links vs. reference citations, the {{Notability}} tag isn't the best way to highlight this and in fact is distracting in a destructive way.

How is a tag destructive? It is, for what it's worth, plainly obvious that the article needs improvement.

Stop taking tags personally. They're about the project, not about the subject.

The tag encourages users to delete the article rather than fix problems. That is the point. It is not personal.

That's precisely what the tag doesn't do. If you want to encourage people to delete the article, you put it up for AfD.

Then why not remove the warning saying "this article is likely to be merged or deleted"?

"Does not meet notability guidelines, please help fix" is not the same as "Does not meet notability guidelines, help fix or this article gets deleted." The latter frames the issue as content not permitted, the former frames the issue as content yet to come. The difference is significant.

physicsforums.com the largest science question and answer site, a partner of Scientific American and sited as a source for a number of wiki entries has been repeatedly rejected as not significant enough.

It seems wiki won't let you create an article about another web site.

The sad thing is that the Inclusionist / Deletionist war does not need to be fought at the data level - they could coexist at the view level.

There could easily be two views into the db:

* en.more.wikipedia.org

* en.less.wikipedia.org

Let the deletionists tag articles with a "less" bit all the want. Each article thus tagged is invisible from en.more.wikipedia.org.

People are still fighting as if it's the 19th century and space is physical and rival.

It's about mindshare. It may or may not be physical, but it certainly is rival.

Yes -- the general public, who don't have strong feelings about the matter, will all end up on one or the other anyway. The other side, the one visited only by people who care about the difference, would become an irrelevant backwater. One side is going to win, and the other is going to lose.

both sides want to declare "regular" wikipedia their lawn though.

I don't think the inclusionists care that much - they just want the information to be out there.

The deletionists, though - yes, they do seem to care about the "right" version.

IMO.

Seems like the simplest compromise is to leave wikipedia as is but change deletion into relegation to another tier.

That would be fine, but there are some 'deletionists' out there that wouldn't be happy with that.

Some deletionists aren't happy with just reverting edits; they insist on actually deleting articles completely and forcing contributors to start over. I've seen this happen and it's like they actually enjoy destroying information more than creating it.

It's one thing to obsess over the quality of an article, but there are people who obsess not only over that, but also about what's in an article's edit history, and don't hesitate to call for total deletion of an article -- about as close to a book-burning as you can get, really -- in order to wipe out something they feel isn't important or just plain don't like.

It's sad, really, because Wikipedia always struck me as having a lot of potential. I still use it to look things up, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend any time contributing, just to have my work deleted out of hand.

I think the possibility of article rehabilitation is probably the best reason to do something like I suggested. Otherwise though a relegated article in my mind should be largely like a deleted one in that the main wikipedia can't link to it - but external links will still take you to the page which would be clearly marked as not in the real wikipedia.

I agree with your point about the extreme deletionists, I think if they couldn't irrevevocably destroy the work they would be a lot less interested in pursuing it with such vigor.

Agreed, but it's not just a motivation problem. Deletionists get an upper-hand over inclusionists when the article is deleted because the history is not available, and you have to start all over. You can't just revert to a previous state of the article (that may not have been far from a state where it had enough references and content to avoid being questioned for notability).

Here's a particularly interesting self-referencing article that was deleted and previously discussed on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518508 And here's the deleted page--with no options to look through the history and see what it used to look like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiid

If you could continue to help edit an article that was made invisible for most users, articles would have a lot more time to prove their notability.

One interesting question is whether Wikipedia is legally even allowed to hide the history of deleted articles. It's not even available in the database dumps, which wouldn't be a realistic format for the vast majority of users anyways:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps#What.27s_not_avail...

Content is licensed under GFDL or CC-SA so you'd think they are required to make it available somewhere.

Or they could just tag certain articles as "not ready" and notify the user. But in the end it's still wikipedia and it's still a volatile reference.

Have you seen Wikipedia? They already do that with tons of pastel warning boxes.

I think it could be replaced by a page building upon wikipedia. For example - same core-articles, but instead of just article+history versions +discussion page it would have more alternative versions of the same article. Maybe with some voting-system. And yeah - it would have to be inclusive - the amount of discussions and trouble caused by deletionists is just not worth it in a time of ever-increasing diskspace. Every single time I stumble upon a page recommended for deletion something in me dies a little.

And why must all the articles be central anyway? Only thing that needs to be central seems to be the index. And some common layout, semantic information and the ability to allow everyone to change pages.

Has anyone already tried building a de-central wikipedia which works by voting?

Because experts are the type of people who can hang out all day voting?

The writing is by experts but not for experts. So each reader is actually qualified to vote. And I think it would help experts to write better for their target audience.

My team and I are exploring that possibility right now.

We have come across a few interesting tidbits considering the model:

A concern is that without a way to direct your crowd sourcing (centralized articles) people will be all over the place and the knowledgebase suffers. (kind of along the lines of http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/technology/internet/19unbo...)

A clear plus would be ability to include more view points. A less subtle plus (but a big one) would be that with a voting system, it would elevate some credibility concerns.

Edit: In answering your question directly, there is Knol.google.com which is very similar to what you are suggesting.

Or how about a wikipedia mirror that doesn't propagate deletions? That way when an article on wikipedia is deleted, the mirror simply displays the last available version.

You have to first quantify whether or not the deletions make the information that is there more or less accurate. That's not an easy issue to decipher, as is evidenced.

There's also the fact that we, as humans have a finite amount of knowledge and it appears likely that much of the low-hanging fruit has been picked in the sense that all the 'easy' articles have been written.

Hooray for subcultures of internet sites and factionalization! Computers have created a bunch of strange new semi-political beliefs.

"We believe that storage is essentially free and more information is almost always better."

"We believe that maintaining quality SnR is most important in group editing situations."

"We believe that fair use extends to sampling and remixing but copyright holders maintain most other control."

"We believe that it's possible for a group of unrelated uncompensated volunteers, acting together, accepting all comers, and embracing anonymity, to create an enyclopedia that will not only rival but possibly exceed the work of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and that it's possible to do that without creating at the same time a galactically monstrous hairball of cruft, misinformation, advertising, and vanity pages."

Some "factionalizations" are more interesting than others.

"Chi has identified one model that Wikipedia's growth pattern matches. 'In my experience, the only thing we've seen these growth patterns [in] before is in population growth studies--where there's some sort of resource constraint that results in this model.' The site, he suggests, is becoming like a community where resources have started to run out."

That's an interesting observation. The other time I have seen a growth curve like that is observing the growth of homeschooling in the United States from the 1980s through the 1990s

http://learninfreedom.org/homeschool_growth.html

to the present. The scarce resource is parents who feel they have enough time to homeschool their children. That resource is not completely exhausted, but the growth of homeschooling in the United States follows the resource-constrained S-shaped curve model much better than an exponential, bigger-is-always-better model. It appears that the resource constraint now on Wikipedia is new editors willing to work with the existing editors. That resource isn't exhausted yet either, but it is scarce and limited, and thus Wikipedia's growth rate has slowed.

Suppose you started volunteering on Wikipedia years ago and for one reason or another you've acquired "insider status" in the form of admin priviledges or alliances with other insiders. Well, there is a natural human tendency to hoard power, that is, to navigate yourself in a position where your decisions matter. Sometimes this is called making your mark on the world or "working for change". Suppose further that it occurs to you to ask yourself whether you support the deletionists or the inclusionists. Well, it is difficult for a human being to make that choice without being influenced (consciously or unconsciously) by the knowledge that under a deletionist policy, insiders such as yourself and your allies make more decisions that matter (and consequently are in a position to earn the indebtedness of people with a stake in those decisions, e.g., over whether the 'pedia includes a bio of themselves or one of their allies).

There's another force acting in WP besides deletion: consolidation. In the early days it was harder to know about pre-existing articles on a subject. Multiple pages on the same topic and closely related topics were common.

For example, I discovered the other day a separate page for Reagan's NPR joke about Russia, "We start bombing in 5 minutes". Another example is subject timelines that are broken out into separate articles for each year.

"Notability" is an unfortunate choice for a criterion since it has a large component of subjectivity. There are many people who are only temporarily famous; many who should be (more) famous are nearly unknown - on Wikipedia, for example, technical people before the 20th century whose discoveries still positively impact our lives. Warriors of all ages, on the other hand, get more than enough attention.

The subjectivity of notability is, I think, a canard, and it's been tackled upthread from here. One thing I think you can't accuse WP of is of being vague about what "Notability" means.

I put myself as one of the persons born in my home town on wikipedia, and they had the nerve to delete it... jk

It seems the inclusionists built Wikipedia into what it is today. It also seems what the deletionists are trying to do: gain Wikipedia more credibility, is a futile effort given the nature of Wikipedia's volatility and inability to be used as a credible secondary source.

The whole idea of a wiki that anyone can edit is so that the best final result always comes through. And this is based on the assumption that there are more reasonable people out there than unreasonable, so that the better article can come out on top through reason.

But if some exclusive group does take over Wikipedia like this then this idea of an open wiki of information where the best content comes out on top is dead. However theoretically wikipedia is still open to everyone right? So to take back wikipedia we wouldn't have to make an alternative. All we have to do is to organize a counter group that's more powerful in numbers and out click those deletionists right? Correct me if I'm wrong I don't edit wikipedia. But if we can't do that then Wikipedia is no longer really open.

My take is that half of this Guardian article makes an important observation about Wikipedia, and the other half tries to relitigate the whole idea of Wikipedia.

The important half: the WP I immersed myself into in 2007 was decidedly less hospitable than the image WP tries to craft for itself. There are two forces I saw that were dragging the project down: editing-as-sport (which, guilty as charged, yes) and status seeking.

pg, I think, got a faceful of the editing-as-sport problem when he looked at the articles on HN/YC topics. WP editors are encouraged to tag first and ask questions later; there's volumes and reams and bookcases and crap-tons of policy and process designed to handle those tags. However, a very vocal subset of WP users will both tag-first, and also take a personal interest in the outcome of those discussions. So if an article is AfD'd (put up for deletion) for notability concerns, and the article's a "Keep", you can bet the {{Notability}} tag is staying and every edit is going to be contested until some face-saving reorganization of the topic emerges (for instance, an omnibus "Y Combinator" article with subsections for pg and Blackwell).

The supposed nurturing atmosphere of the all-volunteer encyclopedia is meanwhile torpedoed by the status-seeking quest for adminship, in which clued-in editors are all too aware that every dispute they engage in is a contest to win or lose credibility in a future WP debate over whether they can put the gold star of adminship on their pages.

There are rationales for both these phenomenon, which I don't want to go into (rms apparently already thinks I'm a total message board geek for WP), but I'll just say that that part of the controversy over WP I think is real and valid.

The second half of the debate here is over deletionism vs. inclusionism. Here I'm less concerned. There is obviously a pervasive misunderstanding about the concept of "notability" and the overall goal of the Wikipedia project. Wikipedia is not the Hitchhiker's Guide. A decision was made long before the Guardian ever noticed WP that, in order to keep the project focussed, topics would be included or excluded based on an acid test of "Notability".

"Notability" in the WP sense isn't subjective. You're notable if reliable sources have written about you. You're not notable if they haven't. The definition of "reliable source" is pretty expansive; my impression is that it goes up to and including "blogs lots of people have heard of". It certainly includes the entire mainstream media.

You can argue that, because WP isn't paper, you should be able to include anything in it, including a "who's who" of everyone who's ever posted code to Freshmeat. You can argue that, but it's pointless to do so. That argument came and went many years ago, and it's settled. The who's-who will have to live under some other domain.

I'm not sure how it's a bad thing that 25% of casual edits are reverted. Perhaps some of the habitual editors are nasty people, but 25% doesn't scare me.

What is "notable" is rather subjective and context-dependant. There ought to be somewhere for all these "non-notable" articles to go. The wikipedia approach to some such articles would be useful even if wikipedia itself doesn't find them notable.

"Its first million articles took five years to put together, but the second was achieved just 12 months later."

"... helped the site reach the 2m article milestone just 17 months after breaking the 1m barrier ..."

From the other numbers in the article 17 months seems right.

For more data and less journalistic hype, don't miss the ASC's own blog:

http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/

baker talked a bit about the deletionists in his (great) article about wikipedia from last year http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131

What a lame argument. I thought there was a rule on HN against wading into Holy Wars anyway

I upvoted because I have to agree. With that said, if I were really concerned about information, or the quality of the information, I would go to a legitimate source rather than some place that allows people with huge egos to decide what is and is not worthy of a quick internet search. But perhaps that point of view breaks the tradition of the Internet.

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