xkcd

by **4=5** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 7:08 am UTC

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:St ... notability

Howard V. Tayler was asked if he wanted to help donate to wikipeida he declined, and stated that non-contribution was the only tool left for protesting the manner in which a few Wikipedia editors and administrators treated dozens of articles about webcomics and the webcomic community.

it's got plenty of space on the internet and every article that is deleated removes content, so why do they remove potentialy useful articles from wikipedia anyway?

by **Malice** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 1:46 pm UTC

Devil's advocate:

A) Because the vast majority of the things they delete are totally useless articles--spam or the non-economic equivalent of spam. (For example, "Fudge dinosaur! Is a dinosaur made of fudge. It is dead now.") Wikipedia is nice because, traveling around, you're not likely to hit that shit very much. Letting in anything means letting in too much noise.

B) Because the people who run Wikipedia want it to be an encyclopedia, or as close to it as the everyone-edits format will allow. This is why they require sources. This is why they like grammar and spelling, too. Wikipedia should look and feel professional, even though the content is user-created.

C) Because somebody's paying for that, and the more stupid pages that get put up about somebody's garage band, the more money it costs. It might be a small amount of money but it adds up over time.

D) The system works better if the only articles in it are ones which will service a reasonably large number of people. If the subject is minute enough that only you know you care about it, you can TELL other people about physically, there's no need to make it available as reference material for everyone in the world.

by **Eleyras** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 6:00 pm UTC

A) Yes, but the articles deleted, on webcomics, would not have been articles about nonexistent things such as fudge dinosaurs, making them (while perhaps not the most useful articles out there) certainly not useless.

B) I think one of the advantages of a user created constantly updating encyclopedia is that it can capture all the random pop culture stuff that others reference. It's a great resource for when someone mentions a band, comic, etc and you don't know what they're talking about.

C) See A. I'm not sure how Wikipedia judges notability, but perhaps a voting system would help on articles that are borderline?

D) See B. Since Wikipedia doesn't have to live on my bookshelf, it can carry more than the average encyclopedia, so the standards for notability should be lower.

by **MikeBabaguh** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 8:07 pm UTC

I'm going to have to agree with Malice; I've always viewed Wikipedia as an online user-created encyclopedia. Webcomics are cool and all, but I'd prefer if fluff was kept out of it.

by **Belial** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 8:11 pm UTC

Why? I fail to see how more information is a bad thing, as long as it's not blatantly stupid. You don't have to flip through the pages as though it were a book, you just search the things you want to know. If you want to pretend it's a super-professional encyclopedia for people who take themselves too seriously, just don't search for the "fluff".

by **zombie_monkey** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 9:01 pm UTC

Well you have to realize Wikipedia is running pretty tight with regard to finance. Every little thing matters. The whole thing is pretty much hanging on a bazzilion ugly hacks. So while I theoretically agree you have to ralize real people have to utilize limited resources, that get utilized pretty much immediately upon their introduction, to keep this running. And while I agree in principle, I can kind of see where they're coming from.

by **Araneae** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 11:53 pm UTC

Eleyras wrote:
C) See A. I'm not sure how Wikipedia judges notability, but perhaps a voting system would help on articles that are borderline?

D) See B. Since Wikipedia doesn't have to live on my bookshelf, it can carry more than the average encyclopedia, so the standards for notability should be lower.

C) There's been a lot of discussion on Wikipedia about how to objectively judge notability. Pages and pages of arguments are archived, if you really want to dig through it. The guideline currenly reads, "A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject."

There is a sort of voting system for borderline articles. There are 3 levels of deletion: speedy deletions can be removed on sight, "proposed deletions" tag articles that can be removed in 5 days if no one objects, and "AfD" is where the real discussion takes place concerning those borderline articles mentioned earlier.

D) The standards for notability ARE a lot lower than those of print encyclopedias, but that doesn't mean they should be totally non-existent.

by **e946** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 5:48 am UTC

Malice wrote:C) Because somebody's paying for that, and the more stupid pages that get put up about somebody's garage band, the more money it costs. It might be a small amount of money but it adds up over time.

The average large page is 100kb, which is ~10000 pages per GB. Newegg has a 500gb hd on sale for $100 right now, so Wikipedia could store 5 million such junk pages for $100. The last donation rally I saw brought in like a million and a half dollars, and according to wikipedia, they have about 2 million pages right now.

I think they can handle a few more junk pages, don't you?

by **Axman** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 7:50 am UTC

I'm going to have to agree with Malice; I've always viewed Wikipedia as an online user-created encyclopedia.

Then it should allow whatever content users want to add. Why are webcomics not OK but episode synopses of TV shows are?

You can't draw a line, so you shouldn't even try.

by **fjafjan** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 9:02 am UTC

I think obviously a line HAS to be drawn, yes, because if I search for say "shoelaces" I don't want to find half a million pages about peoples dogs and tehe shoelaces of people or whatever. However the problem in the webcomic deal is that things that are actually fairly well known and prominent are getting deleted, that is the problem. It's the notion that just because somthing is not on physical print it's extremly obscure, just look at some semi credible source of hits per day/month whatever. Basically if I wrote an obscure comic for a month there could be an article on that, but Loserz got deleted because it wasn't famous enough.

by **Axman** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 9:26 am UTC

Wiki word count

shoelaces: 2,030
webcomics: 3,078
the Wonder Years: 3,899

And they have their priorities straight? For what it's worth, I originally counted Degrassi Junior High, but it only returned 1,487 words.

My point is that if Wikipedia is actually a community website, then it shouldn't decide what counts as valid content. If there're really articles that are contentious, like any number of orphaned articles, they can always decide to delete the content if it doesn't get x pageviews/month or something.

But I would easily find a cross-referenced Penny-Arcade resource to be much more useful than, say, a wiki entry on the Facts of Life.

(4,893 words.)

by **fjafjan** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 9:32 am UTC

No certainly that is the case, I am not saying you should remove the Penny Arcade article.

I am saying that removing SOME articles due to lack of notoriety is good because finding useful information means purging unuseful information, which is half of what the internet is about. Maybe more than half, you get the point no?

If I want to find something about X I don't want to have to manually search through hundreds of useless articles to get to the one I want.

by **KingAl** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 10:18 am UTC

Then you want to change your search algorithm, not your encyclopaedia

by **fjafjan** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 10:32 am UTC

Why? If I have to spend several minutes trying to find the correct search words so I don't get shit it's wasted time ither way.

What's so wrong about maintaining articles that are actually interesting to more than five or six people?

by **Malice** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 11:58 am UTC

What also needs to be understood about this is that the whole issue is the result of three things, in descending importance:

1) A couple of jerkfuck editors who didn't read webcomics and decided it would be great to delete as many webcomic articles as possible. These people knew nothing about webcomics, and so never really responded to logic like "Of course this is notable, it has 8 million readers and print newspaper syndication". They went on a personal (and stupid) crusade. This current issue is largely a reaction to this specific, limited problem.

Beyond that:

2) Problems with the editing system itself, in that editors get arrogant and judge people based on their past (so that new users are said to have nowhere to stand in an argument, even if that new user has excellent real-world credentials for the article or if that new user is intelligent and correct in their argument); in that editing becomes a social thing, an ego-boost. It's this kind of system that allows for egregious acts of editing like the first thing on this list.

Beyond that:

3) Disagreements over what Wikipedia really should be. Some think it should work toward being a reliable encyclopedia; others think it should focus more on the quantity of information presented instead of the quality. Some want a true free-for-all, others want more editorial control. Etc. These are the ideas that end up boiling down to things like "How notable does it need to be?" and "How should we handle the deletion dialogue?"

by **Vaniver** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 1:58 pm UTC

Why? If I have to spend several minutes trying to find the correct search words so I don't get shit it's wasted time ither way.

Research is so hard.

I'm sorry, but you want everything other people would find useful deleted, so that you don't have to scroll past it to what you find useful?

I don't think hard drive space is the limiting factor when it comes to expense- it's probably bandwidth. But the great thing about bandwidth is that it's proportional to the people that care. If only one person a month looks at an article, it costs Wikipedia next to nothing (assuming the article is just text) to host that article. There's no reason to require articles to be notable to a large group- the point is (was) to be the sum total of human knowledge.

Obligatory Wikitruth link

by **crazyjimbo** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 1:59 pm UTC

e946 wrote:
Malice wrote:C) Because somebody's paying for that, and the more stupid pages that get put up about somebody's garage band, the more money it costs. It might be a small amount of money but it adds up over time.

The average large page is 100kb, which is ~10000 pages per GB. Newegg has a 500gb hd on sale for $100 right now, so Wikipedia could store 5 million such junk pages for $100. The last donation rally I saw brought in like a million and a half dollars, and according to wikipedia, they have about 2 million pages right now.

I think they can handle a few more junk pages, don't you?

So the average large page is 100kb, more with revisions. Newegg has a 73Gb 15,000 RPM SCSI Hard Drive for $190, which is what will probably be used in their servers. Assume that they have the data duplicated in RAID at least once, that's $380 for 73Gb. Spread across 10 database servers, that's $3800 for 73Gb. So not including backups, that's ~73,000 articles for $3800. Not quite as cheap as you make out, and I'm being conservative.

That said, the whole point of Wikipedia to me is the freedom of information that other wise would not be shared. Removing data simply because it is not of interest to more than a handful of readers totally defeats the point of it to me. But then that's not Wikipedia's policy, and their policies have to be respected.

by **Maurog** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 2:23 pm UTC

I believe in inherent notability. Less notable articles will have less traffic (otherwise, the traffic makes them notable). The more traffic you get, the more chances knowing people will fix the article to comply to Wiki guidelines.

So suppose a fan created a huge mess of an article on something you think isn't notable. Why delete it? If it isn't notable, nobody's gonna visit it anyway. If by any chance you're wrong, then surely visitors will eventually fix it and bring it to shape.

Suppose 90% of wikipedia is "non-notable" fancruft. As long as 95% of the traffic is going on in the remaining 10%, as far as I'm concerned, you still have a very reliable encyclopedia. And don't worry about the space requirements... if they can afford to store complete history archive on everything, they can afford anything. And it's not like deleting articles saves space, since that history is also saved.

I think deep inside the deletionists are just jealous of comic articles that have dedicated fans who update them.

by **Gelsamel** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 2:32 pm UTC

It's all about image. Sure it COULD store a shit ton of junk pages... but then Wikipedia would be 50% junk.

by **Vaniver** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 2:44 pm UTC

Gelsamel wrote:It's all about image. Sure it COULD store a shit ton of junk pages... but then Wikipedia would be 50% junk.

Are you under the impression that's a larger percentage of junk than the current percentage?

by **Bakemaster** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 2:49 pm UTC

Are you saying it isn't now? There's a separate page for practically every municipality in the metropolitan Boston area. Why the hell would I want to know the demographics, government and notable residents of Methuen, and if I did why wouldn't I simply go to a public library in Methuen or write/email a librarian or public official there?

EDIT: Ninja'd. This post @ Gel.

by **fjafjan** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 4:00 pm UTC

Vaniver wrote:Why? If I have to spend several minutes trying to find the correct search words so I don't get shit it's wasted time ither way.

Research is so hard.

I'm sorry, but you want everything other people would find useful deleted, so that you don't have to scroll past it to what you find useful?

No what I said is I don't think all information ever needs to be on wikipedia.
This leads to that some entries will be deleted because frankly next to no one cares, no on cares that I ate some youghurt just right now, so if I write an entry "Fjafjans youghurt eating 2007" or "who has eaten youghurt in the past 24 hours? I have!" It's of no interest to 99.9999999% people in the world. Some things belong in a dictionary, things that could possibly be of interest, I like having trivia about south park episodes because that is actually useable information. Not all things are.

There is already a 'wikipedia' with everything which is useful or not and it's called the web and people use google to find stuff but the first hit is often wikipedia because it has reasonably good reliable useful information unlike most pages. removing that would make it shit.

Wikipedia has far superior searching and storage capabilities than a normal dictionary so it can handle way way more data, but it cannot handle unlimited data since it's search function is limited aswell, thus there needs to be a threshhold.

by **e946** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 6:22 am UTC

crazyjimbo wrote:So the average large page is 100kb, more with revisions. Newegg has a 73Gb 15,000 RPM SCSI Hard Drive for $190, which is what will probably be used in their servers. Assume that they have the data duplicated in RAID at least once, that's $380 for 73Gb. Spread across 10 database servers, that's $3800 for 73Gb. So not including backups, that's ~73,000 articles for $3800. Not quite as cheap as you make out, and I'm being conservative.

That said, the whole point of Wikipedia to me is the freedom of information that other wise would not be shared. Removing data simply because it is not of interest to more than a handful of readers totally defeats the point of it to me. But then that's not Wikipedia's policy, and their policies have to be respected.

You're right, I was thinking from a "teenager running this site out of his house with no backups or anything" point of view, but I still have to wonder why they'd be using RAID 1 and not 5, and why they'd be going for SCSI over SATA.

by **22/7** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 9:53 am UTC

fjafjan wrote:There is already a 'wikipedia' with everything which is useful or not and it's called the web and people use google to find stuff but the first hit is often wikipedia because it has reasonably good reliable useful information unlike most pages.

From this sentence alone, I can come to no other conclusion than, "You know nothing about how a search engine works."

by **crazyjimbo** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 10:20 am UTC

e946 wrote:You're right, I was thinking from a "teenager running this site out of his house with no backups or anything" point of view, but I still have to wonder why they'd be using RAID 1 and not 5, and why they'd be going for SCSI over SATA.

RAID 1 or 5, they both need at least2 drives - 3 for RAID 5. RAID 5 doesn't scale so well to large storage servers due to the very real possibility of 2 disk failures, but that's a discussion for another thread. And SCSI is faster than SATA although SATA is creeping its way back up. Due to the disproportional cost, it's very possible they use SATA drives. Bear in mind almost anything I said was assumption

.

by **Pixel** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 1:32 pm UTC

Axman wrote:Wiki word count

shoelaces: 2,030
webcomics: 3,078
the Wonder Years: 3,899

And they have their priorities straight?

Given how long the Wonder Years ran and how many millions of viewers it had? Yes. I would be willing to bet cash money that many more people (especially in the US) have heard of and seen The Wonder Years than have read webcomics.

Axman wrote:My point is that if Wikipedia is actually a community website, then it shouldn't decide what counts as valid content. If there're really articles that are contentious, like any number of orphaned articles, they can always decide to delete the content if it doesn't get x pageviews/month or something.

The Community of wikipedia editors are the ones who decide out the notability guidelines. And since anyone can be a wikipedia editor everyone has a potential say in it. And the community of wikipedia editors are the ones who decided the notability guidelines as they currently stand. Don't like them? Go get involved in the discussion. Figure out what you think is a better guideline, read the archives of the Notability talk page to make sure your idea hasn't been brought up and refuted before. Then jump in and put forth your idea. Be prepared to defend it, and to modify it if other editors find fault with it.

Wikipedia is one of the few places in the world where you get that sort of direct ability to influence the entire running of the place. If you are doing that, then good for you. But if you aren't willing to do that, and instead just want to say how wikipedia isn't doing it right, I have no sympathy for your arguments.

by **Maurog** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 2:07 pm UTC

It's not about Wikipedia policies, it's about people who abuse them.

Wikipedia wrote:Follow the spirit, not the letter, of any rules, policies and guidelines if you feel they conflict. If the rules prevent you from improving the encyclopedia, you should ignore them. Disagreements should be resolved through consensus-based discussion, rather than through tightly sticking to rules and procedures.

This is exactly what people ignore when they delete "non-notable" comics articles, and even more so when some jerk just goes on the category and prods them all one by one, which happened not long ago. Did you see the deletion logs on the comic articles? Admins wave aside points like your "many more people have heard of and seen" as fanboyism, which clearly means one of you is in the wrong. Don't tell me you never seen an article deleted against consensus.

The point is, if you need to argue about whether something is notable, it already is.

by **Axman** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 5:22 pm UTC

Wikipedia is one of the few places in the world where you get that sort of direct ability to influence the entire running of the place. If you are doing that, then good for you. But if you aren't willing to do that, and instead just want to say how wikipedia isn't doing it right, I have no sympathy for your arguments.

Balls. I've tried participating in a handful of Wikipedia roles and all I ever experienced was rebuke at worst or just being ignored. The truth is, and I wasn't especially clear about this, was that Wikimedia isn't a community, it's a very independent (and probably affluent) organization with monetary and otherwise unclear goals, the editors are numerous and private (yes you can change things...but you're not an editor) and I think the whole thing lacks vitality and is a penultimate example of how perverse the notion of internet community is.

But, if you disagree, I ask that you assume good faith on my part. I'm acting to maintain a balanced and neutral point of view.

by **e946** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 11:07 pm UTC

Axman wrote: The truth is, and I wasn't especially clear about this, was that Wikimedia isn't a community, it's a very independent (and probably affluent) organization with monetary and otherwise unclear goals, the editors are numerous and private (yes you can change things...but you're not an editor)

[img]
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wikipedian_protester.png[/img]

by **Shadic** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 11:26 pm UTC

Belial wrote:Why? I fail to see how more information is a bad thing, as long as it's not blatantly stupid. You don't have to flip through the pages as though it were a book, you just search the things you want to know. If you want to pretend it's a super-professional encyclopedia for people who take themselves too seriously, just don't search for the "fluff".

I agree here completely. Events basically have to impact what seems to be 100,000 people to be considered "notable," which is just annoying.

Not too long ago, there was a crusade against deleted all pages documenting individual Rom Hacks, and it was obvious that it was being railroaded by the same group of people, all of which had some "Standing." Actually, one person commented on the argument for the page something to the extent of "Delete this page, just like all romhacks.

," evil face included.

He later sent me a message with:

Code: Select all: Hello, and thanks for getting in touch with me about my opinions on Rom-Hacks. I'm afraid to say that, simply put, Rom-Hacks are not notable enough to merit their own space in wikipedia, in my opinion. Because of this, they violate WP:NN, which, while not policy or a guideline, is a general rule of thumb on wikipedia, discussing if a subject is notable enough to warrent article space here. The fact is, they're not sold in any major (or minor) store, and the video game press doesn't review or cover them, which, in itself, makes WP:V, a wikipedia policy, very hard to uphold. Because of all these reasons, I feel that Rom-Hacks, as a general rule, should not be on Wikipedia. I hope that this clears up your question.

And I've actually had a friend that had one of his works featured in a major gaming magazine, but I guess that doesn't count. :roll:

by **e946** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 11:35 pm UTC

Shadic wrote:And I've actually had a friend that had one of his works featured in a major gaming magazine, but I guess that doesn't count.

Did you mention that/cite the article?

by **fjafjan** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 11:48 pm UTC

22/7 wrote:
fjafjan wrote:There is already a 'wikipedia' with everything which is useful or not and it's called the web and people use google to find stuff but the first hit is often wikipedia because it has reasonably good reliable useful information unlike most pages.

From this sentence alone, I can come to no other conclusion than, "You know nothing about how a search engine works."

The point is fairly simple, people look at wiki because an entry on something will feature information that is relevant, not all possible information that ever existed.

Seriously, it's a very very simple principle and the fact that some people have taken it too far does not mean it's a bad principle

by **Shadic** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 12:03 am UTC

e946 wrote:
Shadic wrote:And I've actually had a friend that had one of his works featured in a major gaming magazine, but I guess that doesn't count.

Did you mention that/cite the article?

Yes, I believe that there was a scan of the article listed as a source in it... But apparently that wasn't good enough.

by **22/7** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 4:31 am UTC

fjafjan wrote:
22/7 wrote:
fjafjan wrote:There is already a 'wikipedia' with everything which is useful or not and it's called the web and people use google to find stuff but the first hit is often wikipedia because it has reasonably good reliable useful information unlike most pages.

From this sentence alone, I can come to no other conclusion than, "You know nothing about how a search engine works."

The point is fairly simple, people look at wiki because an entry on something will feature information that is relevant, not all possible information that ever existed.

Seriously, it's a very very simple principle and the fact that some people have taken it too far does not mean it's a bad principle

What you wrote here has *nothing* to do with what I wrote above it. I was commenting on the statement that I quoted, about how, according to you, the reason that wiki articles tend to come up at the top of a google search is because they're so relevant. It's not, it's because they've paid to be there. The point that you made afterwards about why people use it is fairly accurate, however nonsequitor, though ironically I'm not sure what you mean by "very very simple principle".

by **fjafjan** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 12:45 pm UTC

So you're suggesting the only factor google takes into account when listing hits is price payed?
here is the relevant article to dispell your myths.

Unless you are talking bout the actual advertisement that often comes up at the top of a search but I don't recall ever seeing wikipedia there.

by **Maurog** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 1:56 pm UTC

Just because you two are arguing, doesn't mean one of you is right.

by **22/7** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 7:53 pm UTC

My point is, a search engine does not search for relevance of the associated links or how reliable the information is.

And care to enlighten us?

by **Malice** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 8:12 pm UTC

22/7 wrote:My point is, a search engine does not search for relevance of the associated links or how reliable the information is.

I'm under the impression that a search engine will order its results by relevance and/or the number of hits, so that something floats to the top of Google because that's what people go to the most (and for relevance, what best fits the search parameters). IMDB is top for most movies/actors, for example, because that's where people tend to find the information they need when they search for those things. Am I entirely wrong?

by **Yakk** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 8:15 pm UTC

22/7, do you know how google's search sorting algorithm works, even in the vaguest way?

by **22/7** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 8:31 pm UTC

Does anyone here? A lot of people are saying, "that's not how it works" but not many people are offering a "this is how it works." These are the assumptions I'm making about Google's search engine. That the google search engine does not check out the links that are associated with a given page to see how relevant those links are, but rather searches for certain words (the ones given it) combined with other factors like the number of hits that site receives, etc. Also, that Google does not check how reliable a certain set of information on a given site is when it's deciding how high to place it on the search. Is any of that wrong? When I type "WWII" on a google site, is the reason that I don't see some random WWII vet's blog come up as the first match because it's checked the contents of his blog against other credible sources and decided that the guy is full of shit?

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