> Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason self-published media—whether books, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, blogs, personal pages on social networking sites, Internet forum postings, or tweets—are largely not acceptable. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources#Self...

This makes it really hard to defend open source software against WP:N allegations, since most of your coverage is from these kinds of sources...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olusegun_Obasanjo

[2] http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/03/13/WikipediaWhosYo...

Especially since there are still so many holes in the encyclopedia. For instance, parallel giant slalom is a snowboarding event in the Olympics. Yet it doesn't have a page on Wikipedia, just a one line mention on a general snowboarding page: "an event that involves head-to-head racing". I would not be surprised if someone had created a page at some point but it was deleted for not being notable or sourced or some other junk.

I was involved with Wikipedia very heavily for it's first three years (not been involved for the last 5 years), and there have been periods when it went through more liberal stages of allowing a broader range of content. The policies they have now aren't something that've just been made up. They're policies that have evolved over a decade of seeing what works and what doesn't.

Non-notable articles often end up abandoned and vandalized for long period. Sure the precise criteria for notability and verifiability might be debatable, but there's absolutely no question that those criteria help make Wikipedia a reliable source of data.

Think about the reason you want something in Wikipedia (rather than just say on a Google Sites page or Mahalo, etc). You want it on Wikipedia precisely because of the reputation it has, and that reputation is in a large part down to the criteria of notability and verifiability.

Yes, but can't we use some other criteria for this than the utterly absurd ones being deployed to destroy all of the articles on open source software? I used to use the Wikipedia to orient myself in that domain, but now it really is practically useless due to the latest round of deletion madness, which is based on the "If it's not mentioned in the New York Times, it doesn't exist" criterion. (For example, I was looking into wikis recently, and found that if I went back 6 months, the articles were much better...) It seems plain that different criteria need to be developed for different domains.

Either the destruction of the `dwm` article follows from the principles being deployed or it doesn't; and either it is worth an article (which it would be simply insane to deny) or it isn't. You don't take a stand on which combination of views you hold, and what the solution is, but only affirm the abstract principle that 'there are limits'.

I think there are problems - from what I've seen, people outside of an area can be too quick to judge notability. But I find the attitude that nothing should be deleted naive.

The WP article does still lie in userspace waiting to be resurrected, but it's a complete waste of time to try and get it back into mainspace: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MichaelQSchmidt/sandbox_Th...

There are other options out there. Citizendium? If the article about dwm is deleted, re-write it at Citizendium. Why not?

Wikipedia is so 2001-2009. Its time is over, I think.

If you think all articles including the absurd example given above should be included, notability isn't the only thing brought into question. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Wikipedia_is_not

Ultimately, the content is yours to fork if you'd like. As mentioned elsewhere in these discussions, it's really the community that's the main workhorse, something which can't be forked (split perhaps, but not forked).

This page is a lovely example of why I don't contribute to wikipedia anymore.

All the arguments are along the lines of, we should delete/keep this, because (WP:A, WP:B, WP:NO, WP:YES, meatpuppets, sockpuppets, random wikipedia lingo, inuslt to people who do not know wikiepda lingo)

I agree shared vocabulary helps communication, but on wikipedia it has become an active tool to discourage new editors. Sad as at one point I believed wikipedia to be the best thing to happen to Internet.

Also, that is kind of like the ultimate wiki defense: "any obscure terms are linked so my writing doesn't have to be clear".

*BSD guys had a lot of similar arguments and they ended up with many flavors of BSD (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD etc.)

http://levit.at/ion/wiki/Main_Page

If you can work out a good way to share most edits between the forks --- because most edits won't be a source of argument --- then you have a fighting chance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPages

{{User :OS:Ubuntu Netbook Remix}}

http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...

But what to do about it? Various people have mentioned the idea of a WP fork. This has been tried before, a number of times. These tend not to go anywhere. The problem seems to be getting a critical mass of people to work on it.

Another idea I've been wondering about: start a movement to get inclusionists back into WP. It should have its own website, discussion area (inside or outside WP?), etc. Someone should write up ideas on how WP can be changed (e.g., vote NO on all deletion polls, not as a statement that any particular article should not be deleted, but rather simply to set a higher standard for deletion).

Thoughts? (Or has this also been done already?)

Speaking as a former admin and an eventuo-inclusionist: if I went to close an AfD and saw that particular tactic being used, the keep side would've just lost at least 2 votes' worth of influence.

As an aside I wonder if Wikipedia will ever be forked due to this apparent increasing bureaucracy.

The real problem is the danger of relevant articles becoming lost between (and becoming filled with links to) the more numerous irrelevant ones.

About a year ago, there was a mini-campaign on HN to save the article about Fravia. It narrowly avoided getting deleted, but look at it now - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia - it's still a terrible, rambling mess, with almost every citation leading to Fravia's own website. The information in the article may or may not be true, and we don't really have any way of knowing.

It really seems like something has to reach a certain level of notability before it's possible to write an article of sufficient quality about it.

Hell, it was fork from dwm author's _own_ project wmii.

Personally I want EVERYTHING in it, even if it's not notable, I don't care. The guideline should be: would 1 other (un-involved, un-related, etc) person on the planet be interested it? Then put it in.

I want to see a page on tips and techniques on laying brick, and page on the history of the coffee house down the corner from where you live. Everything.

As for this entry, specifically, I have read it. And I'd go back to what I mentioned about cleaning up bad content. The article can be fixed. It does not need to be eliminated.

Does every piece of software ever written need a Wikipedia page? If you don't like where they're drawing the line, where would you draw it?

(Granted, I understand sometimes the argument is that a topic doesn't deserve an entry.)

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

I myself would be fine with articles about This-andthat Inc's latest gadget if there are facts and information inside.