Anyone who spends serious time on Wikipedia could tell you immediately what the site would be like if it required "hundreds" of people to delete a page: completely overrun with spam and vanity pages --- not about BBS door games or individual BBS's or open source authors or even bloggers, but about individual local little league teams, bands that have never played gigs or released tracks, marketing professionals, individual episodes of fake TV shows, attempts at defaming individual high school girls, 6th place finishers in city council elections, political parties with one member, "microbrew" beer pages for each of some guy's homebrew projects, made up cities in made up countries as part of some guy's counterfactual world history, repeat all previous entries in this list for each of Japan, England, Belgium, and South Africa, amateur open-mic-night standup comedians, individual bootlegged videos of concerts, "one of the 100 most influential Chinese-Canadians in British Columbia", individual unpublished short stories, as-yet-unreleased new energy drinks from as-yet-unstarted startups, 9000 pages about individual aspects of the Ron Paul campaign, film festivals from towns in Nebraska with fewer than 5000 people, repeat all previous entries in this list 10 times over the course of a year with slightly permuted names, fake professors at real universities, real professors occupying fake posts at fake universities, 46 different theories of cold fusion, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, world championship players from nonexistant Starcraft leagues, aspirational pages about made-up video games, individual authors of self-published ebooks, and of course, 1-5 pages about every single company incorporated in every US state.
In other words: exactly what you'd expect from an "encyclopedia that anyone in the world can edit". The site would be every naysayer's 1999 prediction for what Wikipedia would become.
However, while the actual state of Wikipedia is much better than your alternate future, what we have right now is also extremely dangerous and misleading. Today it is composed of accurate, well-written sentences and inaccurate, self-aggrandizing, or just schizophrenic sentences. But they're all intermingled.
Pick any article, say block cipher modes, CTR in particular:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipher_block_chaining#Counter_....
It starts off ok, but then heads off the weeds with "Nevertheless, there are specialized attacks like a Hardware Fault Attack that is based on the usage of a simple counter function as input.[14]" This is a reference to a minor paper in a conference I've never heard of, likely added by the authors themselves.
"Fix it yourself", comes the cry. But without some sort of educated review board, you end up having to explain the background of the field in order to get around to why a given reference is not noteworthy. Often, the choice comes down to who spends more time on Wikipedia. Guess who doesn't?
Meanwhile, a generation is growing up with this as their only example of an "encyclopedia".
I think my kids are far better off with Wikipedia than they would be with "real" encyclopedias.
I suppose my friend Nate could be arguing the following: it's unfortunate that there is marginal content that survives wikilawyering while at the same time there's good content that doesn't. But he hasn't supported that argument with evidence. What's the "good" content that belongs under CTR mode that he'd have a hard time placing there? The CTR coverage in WP isn't bad because of deletionism; it's bad because there isn't enough crypto expertise in the WP editor community.
If Nate sat down and wrote a well-sourced article on CTR mode, it would survive.
(Sadly, I can't even look at the article, for the reason I already complained about: when Wikipedia decides to delete something, it is totally removed from the website in a way such that you cannot use edit history to get it back, making arguments about it impossible post-facto. I wish I could make a real judgement for myself.)
I do now see, however, why you made your Britannica comment: you are responding only to the final sentence of Nate's comment ("Meanwhile, a generation is growing up with this as their only example of an "encyclopedia"."), which I mostly ignored as it was just rhetoric ;P. (I am sorry that I did that, as it caused me to misunderstand your's.)
Regardless, looking at the actual argument thread, Britannica is entirely irrelevant unless it can be shown that either 1) they were of higher quality due to their more limited focus, or 2) that their eventual downfall was related to them being more likely to cover a niche topic than Wikipedia ;P.
Regardless--to now respond to your new comment--at some point you need to make a choice: either that content is notable, or it is not. If it is, you have to decide who is allowed to determine whether that fact. Wikipedia, FWIW, does not appreciate content that requires "expertise" much, as they want everything verifiable by the layman.
(Again, leading to what I consider to be a ludicrous situation with respect to the various articles surrounding RSA: there is much more coverage of the recent non-attack on embedded systems with bad random number generators than there is on actual modern mathematical attacks, seemingly because the former could be verified by newspaper articles and the latter requires citing academic papers, as the last time a review paper in this field was published, a requirement for Wikipedia's "primary sources must be verified by secondary sources" requirement, was 1999.)
"...similarly, a scientific paper documenting a new experiment is a primary source on the outcome of that experiment."
"A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the source but without further, specialized knowledge."
"For example, a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research"
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
"All Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources. Reliable primary sources may occasionally be used with care as an adjunct to the secondary literature, but there remains potential for misuse." (emphasis copied from original)
What you're doing here is cherry picking a very reasonable policy that Wikipedia has and generalizing it far past its actual application.
What you're saying is that WP frowns on journal articles because they are "primary sources".
What WP actually says is that you can't go take the results of journal articles and use them to synthesize conclusions that the author didn't actually make inside a Wikipedia article. In other words, you cannot use WP articles to ratify new science.
I feel like if there's one place on the Internet that should appreciate a policy forbidding unfounded extrapolation from journal articles, it should be HN, which routinely hosts debates that pick apart the media's broken analysis of scientific articles.
You do realize that I quoted Wikipedia's guidelines, right? That those links I added were not some kind of lie: they were direct references to validate my argument.
Wikipedia seriously goes so far as to state that "mainstream newspapers" are an example of "the most reliable sources", in addition to all of the stuff I already pasted from their guidelines about journal papers.
(OK, I have 2% battery, and I can't find the reference for this, so I'm going to have to temporarily cede this argument. Grrr. I had that bit on newspapers as direct quotes in an argument from a couple months ago on this same topic, though. :( It certainly explains common practice, which "you are allowed to cite primary journal articles without backing them up from secondary sources" does not, in addition to bring a contradiction of the various guidelines.)
It is simply not true that WP disallows citations to the academic cryptologic literature. The opposite is true.
Again, you've confused the actual policy, which says that you can't take a journal article, infer from it conclusions the author didn't make, and then draw those conclusions without any other support in the body of a WP article. The policy does not say that journal articles aren't sources.
"""None of the content in question is "wrong": we are only discussing things with "inappropriate weight". Are you saying that the game Space Empire Elite (the article that Jason Scott is angry about today) did not exist? Was there something else on the article that you believe was "wrong"? We are explicitly discussing "notability" here.
(Sadly, I can't even look at the article, for the reason I already complained about: when Wikipedia decides to delete something, it is totally removed from the website in a way such that you cannot use edit history to get it back, making arguments about it impossible post-facto. I wish I could make a real judgement for myself.)"""
Everything after those two paragraphs was "ok, of you insist on making a confusing non sequitur about Britannica based on that one rhetorical sentence from Nate's argument, I guess I can play along and argue", but is sadly the only thing you insist on arguing about, ignoring th deletionism issue. :(
That means you won, congratulations: it does not mean I don't want them rebutted, as if so I wouldn't explicitly cede; the implication there would be I don't want to lose, and yet here I am, saying you must be right, as I can't back my arguments up anymore. You won: don't be angry you won.
However, you simply ignored all of the main deletionist-related arguments in your quest to defeat the one unrelated thing you felt you could argue against (the verifiability of crypto papers on Wikipedia). "I'm mystified by why you feel the need to do that, by the way."
You first ignored Nate's argument, concentrating on the rhetorical ending note; you side-stepped my calling you out on that (so you could argue more about verifiability), and then you ignored my attempt to reconnect to the mainline argument... you are pretty much just trolling, and I fell for it :(.
(added:) Wait, define "quietly edited"? I didn't remove anything from them (normally for typos and grammar). I often redraft what I say during the couple minutes after I post it, but I don't alter the argument. The only edits I made to that post were 1) to remove a sentence "please argue your point better" which wasn't even in my original submission (and when I looked at it, I decided it was needlessly insulting; it was there maybe 30 seconds; I shouldn't have said it, and I apologize), 2) to add the paragraph at the top, which I explicitly said was an "edit", as I felt it not worth a second reply; and 3) to remove a hyperlink I had originally used as the reference for the thing on newspapers in a panic at 3% battery life based on a Google hit that was wrong, replacing it with me explicitly ceding the argument when I couldn't find the right hyperlink, which only puts you at an advantage.
That's completely ineffective. The paper by Jaffe shows how to perform DPA (passive, not active attack) against various counter modes of AES, despite the permutation in use for the counter.
http://www.iacr.org/workshops/ches/ches2007/presentations/S1...
However, in order for me to remove the first reference and add the second one, I'd have to undertake a war of participation on Wikipedia. The outcome would not be determined by anyone I respect in cryptography, but by people who happen to be dedicated to a particular a message board.
You have your own experience with such people:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:StankDawg
Wikipedia is a cesspool, and I'm very sad to see "worse but free" winning out yet again.
Incidentally, while I strongly advise not reading the "StankDawg Debates", I'll note that they're a case of me, a deletionist, losing an argument to anti-deletionists.
1. Britannica choosing not to have an article on it since they can't do it justice.
2. Papers or books (you know, things that cost money and real effort to develop) on cryptography that give much more thorough, accurate, and unbiased information.
Perhaps the answer to this is to allow for "personal" wiki pages that can be approved for inclusion into the main body of Wikipedia.
From my perspective, I would rather have lots of extra fluff in Wikipedia that I will never see rather than whole subjects being deleted from the site on the whims of a few jerk admins.
Edit: And you seem to be defending the deletion of BBS history under the guise that "Else spam would be everywhere!" which isn't an argument I agree with.
A friend of mine recently created a Wikipedia article for one of her own economic theories. She is not an economist, and as far as I know has never studied economics. The theory is loosely based on the work of one economist, but the sources she listed included her own blog, that economist's work, and newspaper articles--not articles about "the XYZ Theory," but articles about events she believes are relevant to her theory. But the end result was a reasonably well-written article, with plenty of linked citations (which would appear relevant to anyone not paying close attention), about a theory that does not exist. And because the article got so little traffic, she was the only one editing it.
The thing is, when she linked to that article from her blog and social media profiles, and from other tangentially related Wikipedia articles, suddenly that theory seemed to have some validity that it hadn't had before. And googling "XYZ Theory," which would have gotten 0 results the day before, now got a handful of results. All of them were related to that article or her blog, of course, but someone casually searching for information might just click through to the Wiki article without noticing.
The point is, articles about non-notable topics aren't just irrelevant. They're of much lower average quality than the rest of Wikipedia because they have much less traffic and many fewer potential editors knowledgable about the topic. They're more likely to have factual inaccuracies, more likely to be biased, more likely to just suck. And it'd dramatically reduce the confidence one could have in any Wikipedia article about anything one hadn't heard of before, because you might be its first viewer.
The proper solution seems to be to let the articles stay, and learn that they don't have much weight.
And if deletionism is a reaction to SEO optimization, as the other comment states, it is even more of a tragedy. Really, we have to delete articles for fear of somebody getting an unfair SEO boost? Again the solution seems to be to just lower the impact of links from Wikipedia.
We all say "sure, we know not to trust wikipedia" but when it's the first google hit for many topics, can you really pretend you always read it critically?
Second, there are clear practical reasons why it would matter if the examples I provided survived as Wikipedia articles:
* The overall perception of Wikipedia's reliability --- which, in reality, is comparable to that of Britannica's for most subjects, and particularly for subjects that are important in the context of traditional encylopedias --- would be sharply diminished.
* The encyclopedia would be full of overtly false information, since no contributor to the project would be able to verify any of the information in those articles.
* Wikipedia would be ruthlessly gamed to get pages to the top of Google SERPs (it already is, and a lot of deletionism over startups and individual people is a reaction to that).
* The project would lose huge amounts of time to mediating squabbles over article name real estate as different garage bands or local volleyball teams argued over which should be the first listed name for their project.
The naysayers in 1999 said Wikipedia would be hopelessly inaccurate, not that it would contain lots of information. I don't think "This site will become a vast repository of information about all subjects great and small" would even have counted as naysaying.
You know what, though? For all of the breadth of your list of horrors that would suddenly be covered on Wikipedia: I'd love to see every single one of those on the site. I want to see them represented, in fact, so strongly that I am having a difficult time convincing myself that you aren't actually just being really sarcastic about this whole issue (and then I'm being too daft to realize "oh, he's being absurdist, listing things which we actually would want, to make a point").
The concern should only be whether or not the information, if found on the site, could possibly be accurate or trusted, and the realization to have there is that a better solution to that problem is to more effectively expose the edit state of the article (a la IBM's "History Flow" visualization), as the problem of accuracy and notability is already a serious problem in individual paragraphs of articles about topics whose conclusion is non-controversial even to deletionists.
Unfortunately for that rebuttal to my comment, AfDs on Wikipedia are archived:
Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/#{ YEAR }_#{ MONTH }_#{ DAY }
For instance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...
You will, perusing these pages at random, discover a couple things:
* There are a LOT of terrible articles submitted to Wikipedia every day
* The examples I provided upthread are representative of what Wikipedia actually deals with.
* An astounding amount of effort goes into diligently handling those articles on a case-by-case basis.
A few months ago, another "deletionism" freakout on HN happened when a famous SEO expert's friend found her article deleted, and the SEO expert wrote an angry blog post. In discussing the incident on HN, two things emerged: first, the erstwhile WP subject was not in fact notable, and second, in handling the AfD for the article, before any media attention had landed on that particular debate --- that is, while that AfD was just another routine debate --- a Wikipedia volunteer actually took the time to look up the library circulation numbers for a book the subject had ostensibly published.
My "rebuttal" was actually that I liked that entire list of things, and I can only see Wikipedia being better for including information on all of those topics (along with appropriate visualization to demonstrate the inability to as easily trust the content that has had fewer editors, something you need anyway to solve the "subparagraph of article 4" problem).
Honestly, I thereby cannot see one thing in your most recent comment that actually responds to either of those contentions; again, to be highly repetitive on purpose: 1) that those things are not inherently bad, and 2) that there are better ways of solving verifiability for both articles and paragraphs (the latter of which being important).
(Also, on the off-chance this wasn't clear to anyone: the actual articles are deleted permanently. What is archived publicly is only the argument regarding the deletion, which is often just "I don't think it has enough sources", "I think it counts", "no, it didn't", as in the case with the article Jason Scott is complaining about today: without the actual text of the article or what the references even were, you cannot judge for yourself. I maintain this is inexcusable for a project with Wikipedia's charter.)
* Those articles are extremely likely to be inaccurate, because nobody outside the very small number of people with firsthand knowledge about them can verify them.
* It's manifestly obvious that those articles would quickly overwhelm the encyclopedia with obviously bullshit content; again, just look to the absolutely enormous quantity of totally ridiculous articles logged, complete with deletion debates, on the AfD link I provided.
* The articles themselves would spark huge time-wasting debates about placement and weighting, which is something that already happens with verifiable articles.
* A huge incentive exists to push vanity content onto WP because of its prominence on the Internet.
I already made these arguments: I do not see you responding to them; I, and other people on this thread, do not agree with your personal assertion regarding how the site will be "overwhelmed", so that is not an argument unless you can provide actual evidence that an infinite number mostly-pointless articles will cause Wikipedia harm. The closest you come is jut asserting that people will overly trust it, not why or whether deletionism is a better fix than my proposal.
(edit:) You also should tie the response back to the game in question: even if many of these spam articles should be culled, maybe the barrier to culling should simply be higher, in order to decrease the false positive rate. That was the argument made at the very top of this thread and, you know what?... you seemed to ignore it as well, as you only seem to care about the one issue: whether crap could exist and whether the site could get a lot of it if it had no filters at all... that isn't even controversial (and to the extent that it is, it seems to mainly be surrounding whether the specific things in your list were crap, not whether one could imagine something that was truly worthy of being deleted, even "speedily").
Indeed, your tacit assumption is that deletion improves quality, on average. But (a) you don't consider the many false negatives and (b) you don't consider the effect of deterring knowledgeable contributors, without whom quality will decline. We know many knowledgeable people have been discouraged because of the hostility of Wikipedia editors towards newcomers. You've seen the stats on how Wikipedia edits are topping out, how a tiny core of editors rules the site.
It is not hard to have a good search algorithm determine which pages are crap and which aren't. Some obvious features: the number of editors, Flesch-Kincaid level, number of edits, size of the page, number of references, etc.
Automatic search will always outperform manual deletion at scale, especially for an audience as diverse as Wikipedia's.
If you think "search" is the answer, you don't need to do anything. Let the deletionists do their thing, and just put your content somewhere else. Search will find it.
But it's currently far, far too low.
That any small gang of weirdos can get pages deleted is bazonkers. And given the rise of deletionism it's easy to round up a deletion posse for damn near anything.
It needs to be harder to delete. The Library-of-Babel examples[1] you give would still be deleted even if the bar were higher.
[1] http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.htm...
Also, do words mean specific things to you, or are you just trying to communicate how article deletion makes you feel? Because when you call Wikipedia a "lie" that has "inverted the premise" and "ratched the door shut" on contributors, you should know that's not only false, but trivially falsifiable.
Here's how:
1. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPagesFeed
2. Sort by "Oldest"
3. Set a filter on articles by "new editors".
4. Notice how there are tens of thousands of them.
It seems likely to me that a lot of people who are up in arms about "deletionism" really do think individual admins randomly zorch articles for no reason. That's not generally how it works.
And because none of the defenders were wikipedia insiders there was nothing anyone could do.
I have no idea where on Wikipedia this is a problem. Since this is Hacker News, I humbly request than you expand your stomping grounds to include articles on algorithms. Coverage and quality is woefully inadequate, and I've yet to see the tracks of a deletion brigade running through any of them.
Also, I've found learning then explaining algorithms is a wonderful way to retain them long-term. Benefits all around.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ann_Davidson
This is an article about an individual non-famous executive at a tech company.
I've never once had to defend it (it's been more than a year since I even looked at it). Why hasn't it been deleted by roving bands of "deletionists" trying to score points?
Because it cites sources and makes a clear statement of notability, as the Wikipedia project asks.
Does the Wikipedia project make mistakes and delete articles it shouldn't? Sure! All the time. But, for the most part, if you do what Wikipedia asks you to do, the system works fine. If you write an article about an algorithm that cites the academic literature, it'll most likely survive.
On the other hand, if you write an article about a well-known algorithm but fail to cite sources or include a single-sentence lede about why the algorithm is important, it is somewhat likely that some Wikipedian patrolling new articles will nominate it for deletion. Why? Because it'll be a member of a cohort of similar-looking articles most of which will be the CS equivalent of cold fusion research, and without citations, Wikipedians will have nothing to judge it by.
To me, it's a small miracle that Wikipedia works as well as it does, and that Wikipedia has more or less replaced "real" encyclopedias. That they'll occasionally jump the gun on deleting articles that don't look legitimate seems like a very, very small price to pay for that.
A price is something you must give up in exchange for something else. I am not convinced that the wikilawyers are the price of Wikipedia any more than a crazy man punching people outside of McDonald's is the price of a hamburger. In reality, you could probably get rid of one and still have the other.
The value of Wikipedia to most people is in the massive amount of work that is put into improving the articles and the breadth of information it contains despite all the deletion — I know not a single normal person who looks at Wikipedia and says, "Thank God I cannot find anything non-notable on here. I was worried about that."
That's a point you didn't make anywhere upthread, so it's disingenuous to say I'm avoiding it the way you avoided my argument, but I'm happy to stay on track. Point me to the pervasive class of mistakes WP is making by trusting some sources and not others?
I'm sympathetic to this argument, because when I was actually volunteering for WP back in 2007, I spent a lot of time beating back vanity pages that were anchored in one line mentions in trade press articles that were merely regurgitating press releases. So I'm with you about the low value of ComputorEdge. But when you say that computer scientists are systematically disadvantaged because of WP:V rules that prioritize ComputorEdge over LWN, you lose me, because I don't see that happening.
Incidentally, I just looked over Wikipedia's notability rules and they seem to be a bit more reasonable than they were when I used to edit things there, so props to them for making progress on that issue.
Wikipedia gets fuzzy when you step outside the basics. Is comprehensive list of "Two and a Half Men" episodes from 2003 notable? Are the results and player profiles of the 1959 NBA draft worthy? A stub article about a village in rural Poland?
In those cases, the answer is "yes", because there is a constituency for NBA fans and TV fans. When you step outside these types of topics, you are stepping off of a cliff, and wikipedians will capriciously and relentlessly enforce whatever rules they deem important.
But I didn't have to do anything to keep my article on the site. All I did was (a) write a clear statement of why the topic was notable, and (b) cite sources. That is not a difficult pair of rules to remember.
But if you believe the prevailing sentiment on HN about how WP and "deletionism" works, it should have been extremely difficult for me to keep Mary Ann Davidson on WP. I should have been in multiple AfD debates defending the article. Instead, I wrote it, walked away, and 5 years later there it stands.
More often than not, what's actually happening in specific deletion freakouts is, the article in question cites no sources, and makes no claim about why the subject is notable.
Most of the time you actually aren't allowed to do that; there seem to be exceptions in a few fields, such as Medicine, but the overall policy of Wikipedia is that you cannot cite primary sources, preferring, very specifically, newspapers. Of course, there are secondary sources in academia (summary papers), but they are fewer and far between, making it difficult to defend some newer topics. The article on "Coppersmith%27s_Attack" against RSA, for example, is seemingly forced to cite a summary paper. (The article on RSA itself has a couple citations to an original paper, but only if it can be backed with a secondary source.)
Where available, academic and peer-reviewed publications are usually
the most reliable sources, such as in history, medicine, and
science. But they are not the only reliable sources in such areas. You
may also use material from reliable non-academic sources, particularly
if it appears in respected mainstream publications. Other reliable
sources include university-level textbooks, books published by
respected publishing houses, magazines, journals, and mainstream
newspapers. You may also use electronic media, subject to the same
criteria. See details in Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources and
Wikipedia:Search engine test.
On contentious areas where a lot of people are interested and strongly disagree, I'm not really sure how to do it better. Wikipedia is often suboptimal, but so is the opposite, "expert-based" model. I'm an academic, and if you get bunch of us in a room, from different strongly opposed viewpoints, and ask us to try to come up with a consensus survey article, that experience is usually going to end up being painful. I think I'd actually rather wade into a Wikipedia edit war than serve on those kinds of document-writing committees.
If your particular niche has avoided this, bully on you. But I personally wouldn't want to join it, because if more people come on board, that means more attention and thus (in my mind, at least) greater likelihood of attracting the wikilawyers.
Just Googling around Hacker News, I find a number of innocuous pages whose maintainers have had to defend themselves against deletion.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2752285
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216723
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288200
You might agree or disagree with some particular cases, and sometimes things go the right way, but either way it's still a hassle that you have to fight. Personally, I don't remember what the specific pages were I used to help maintain. I was doing it because I wanted to help out and I saw those pages could use it rather than because I cared a lot about the topics. But I do remember it was unpleasant and I wouldn't want to deal with such people again.
Cite the Wikipedia debates you say are happening. Citing HN freakouts isn't a valid argument, because anyone in the world can spark one at any time, because anybody can nominate any article for deletion.
The thing is, even when you succeed in fending off all that, it doesn't really feel good to have spent time on Wikipedia politics.
The fact that anybody can nominate any article for deletion doesn't really run counter to my point, which is, to reiterate:
> No matter how innocuous the topic, if somebody takes notice of it, you'll often find yourself constantly having to fight random people … it was unpleasant and I wouldn't want to deal with such people again.
In fact, when these freakouts happen, people who believe in the articles and know how WP works have to take pains to tell people not to jump into the AfD debate and start "voting" for the articles, because that actually makes the process work worse. Most of the time, when a self-evidently valuable article is proposed for deletion, WP's editors do a just-fine job of making sure they aren't actually deleted.
What you did here was move the goalposts. You claimed that computer scientists are getting shot down in content debates on WP. I asked you to point us to one of those debates happening, where the "jerk brigade" of editors and admins on WP were shouting contributors off of topics. All those debates and shoutings-down are logged.
You responded by highlighting discussions on HN of people freaking out about deletionism. We already know people on HN are freaking out about deletionism. Stipulated! The point is: those people freaking out on HN are mostly wrong.
But no, I am not moving the goalposts. I'm pretty convinced at this point that you've projected other people's goalposts onto my playing field. I'll quote myself again:
> No matter how innocuous the topic, if somebody takes notice of it, you'll often find yourself constantly having to fight random people
> Just Googling around Hacker News, I find a number of innocuous pages whose maintainers have had to defend themselves against deletion.
> Personally, I don't remember what the specific pages were I used to help maintain. I was doing it because I wanted to help out and I saw those pages could use it rather than because I cared a lot about the topics. But I do remember it was unpleasant and I wouldn't want to deal with such people again.
Those have been the goalposts all along. I didn't say anything about getting "shouted off topics." I just said it involves more headaches than I feel it ought to. (Clearly some people like mjn and yourself haven't had that experience, and I'm glad, but that doesn't take the bad taste out of the mouths of people who have.)
If the "fight" we're talking about here is (a) one simple sentence stating why the subject is notable and (b) a couple of links, I'm not sure "fight" is the right term.
The people I've seen run into problems most often are either in political hot-button areas, or have too close connection to a subject: someone writing an article on their own programming language, on their own academic contributions, their own company, or that of someone/something they have a close relationship to. If anything, that kind of CoI editing is still rather laxly tolerated, rather than too strongly policed. I know of at least one university that actually has paid staff writing puff pieces on their professors, and most of them are sadly still there, untouched, because there honestly isn't that much close scrutiny.
Imo experiences are much better if you start from the perspective of wanting to improve the encyclopedia, rather than from the perspective of wanting to get a particular thing into it and then maintain/defend that article. The way I usually work: start with a good source I have no personal connection to, and write articles based on it (and citing it!). For example, pick up Knuth's TAOCP, find some interesting subjects it discusses that are not yet covered in Wikipedia, and write a well-cited article. There are >99% odds that people are going to be happy with that kind of contribution, not try to delete it. I've recently been doing that with some books on archaeological sites, and I've gotten only positive comments about it; people are generally happy that I'm filling in articles on important sites that Wikipedia still lacks articles on, and that I'm doing so with references to good scholarly literature on them.
That's not to say every encounter with another editor I've had is positive, just that I think it works reasonably well on the whole, especially given the scope of the endeavor, which I would have guessed was frankly impossible, if you had asked me 10 years ago ("random people on the internet writing the superset of all subject encyclopedias?! won't it just be filled with cranks and nonsense?!"). Actually that's an interesting aspect of the HN reaction: HN is generally worried about Wikipedia being too closed, too deletionist, etc, whereas I'd guess that 90% of the world is worried about Wikipedia being too permissive, not fact-checking or insisting on sources strongly enough, etc. The most common criticism outside HN is pressure to add more reviewing and quality-control mechanisms, which gets especially strong in the wake of occasional hoaxes or libel scandals.
This sounds quite interesting. Do you do this by rough intuitive feel, or is there any quantitative/analytical data from Wikipedia that can be used to prioritize attention this way? (For example: a list of places where the imbalance between readers/inbound-Google-referrals and content/active-editors is greatest?)
I lost enthusiasm for contributing to Wikipedia after that and haven't done much there since. Occasionally I correct minor-yet-annoying spelling errors, but that's about it.
The façade says "come and contribute!"
The actual operation of the site is no longer like that. There has been a total inversion of the premise.
Wikipedia should have an anti-deletion bias.
There. I said it.
It should take a massive number of people to delete a page. Hundreds. Thousands maybe. Some particular amount of registered users (5% say, or double the square root. Whatever).