Hacker News Reader

Comment by jobu | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't there a similar debate over Quality vs Quantity with the Wikipedia community a few years back? It's been a while, but I remember seeing complaints about thousands of articles getting culled for being trivial (comic books, movies, anime, moderately famous people or places).

It's hard to find many articles about it anymore, but I did find this from 2007: http://grouplens.org/wikipedia-quality-over-quantity/

View on HN

You might get more results searching for "deletionism vs inclusionism", which seems to be the most widely used name for the debate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...

What's the current general stance on that these days I wonder? What's the prevailing wind?

The deletionists won and quite a few people refuse to participate anymore. Which leads to declining quality of article and moderation...

I was one of those who left. I let my adminship elapse after 10 years.

I also don't contribute much to SO, or to any SE properties, despite being on the early public beta. (remember the signup as a google spreadhseet). I'm ID 479 on SO.

Yep. And the deletionists where more often the "majority" culture and male, which resulted in a feedback loop for the nonminority and female. New minority turn up, have a bad experience and leaves. I think it was studied let me see if I can find the paper. I know the results were replicated with comment bots.

Update, not the ones I was thinking of but a good read. HBS Cases: How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn't) http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pdf/item/5605.pdf

That discussion has been deleted.

Well, it was more than a few years ago at this point, and the long and short of it is that the deletionists won.

Gwern has a fairly thorough elegy for the (now dead) inclusionist beliefs: http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism.

The funny thing is that the fanboys fight back against this tactic by putting in hundreds of citations to "legitmize" articles about video games. Browse through some of them and you'll often see more citations than most of the math and science articles. Meanwhile, worthwhile articles that don't have rabid fans get deleted due to lack of "noteworthiness" (by someone's arbitrary standard of the day) or citations.

If that is what it takes to get the deletionists away then feel free to add any valid reference I say.

I have given up though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com