I can understand why wiki articles get deleted. What I cannot understand is why their edit history is also deleted. If part of an article is deleted, one can still find it in the article history. But if the article is deleted entirely, there is no way to check what used to be there.
I found this remarkable irritating myself. I created a Wikipedia page recently for a former TV host, and current podcaster I really enjoy. He's written several books and is cited by other people. I've certainly seen much less noteworthy people having Wikipedia pages.
I spent several hours gathering sources and put together a decent little Wikipedia page. It was voted as being not-noteworthy and removed. I didn't realize all my citations were going to go with it. Wasn't up long enough even to get picked up by the wayback machine.
The “notability” criterion on Wikipedia is remarkably slippery.
In theory, it is objective. There should be no real question about it. It is a synonym for something like “evidenceable,” “researchable,” or “verifiable.” Something is ‘notable’ according not to subjective perception but rather whether you can find third party sources to corroborate basic details. Notability is about the problem of, “You said this podcaster’s real name was X Quasimodo Mogadishu, the X is not short for anything, his literal first name is the letter X... That looks a lot like vandalism to me, is there a third party source that I can consult to confirm if this was vandalism or reality?” If such details are unverifiable, we filethe subject of the article as “not notable” and delete the page until that changes.
In practice, the word is so pliable that it is bent into whatever shape the moderators desire. I have heard “well, this guy is notable in the such-and-so community, just not on the world stage.” my response, “What?! What on earth does that have to do with me finding third party sources to confirm what facts I am seeing in this article? Like, are you saying that the third party sources are encoded in hopeless amounts of jargon such that it is no longer English?” met silence, because of course that's not the point, the point is that the admins can reinvent the definition of notability as they see fit.
Don't feel bad that you got burned. The basic problem is that Wikipedia is a democracy, and democratic governance requires politics, and you came into the situation as a political outsider. Of course it didn't go your way, it only goes your way if you are lucky.
Interesting that you've had problems with someone with that many sources/public image.
My project has stalled, but there was a point when I was putting together a Wikipedia page for notable composers of the 20th and 21st century. I came up with some criteria that would filter out most of the composers listed on their respective "list of 20th century composers" and "list of 21st century composers". If you haven't seen these lists, they are HUGE and thus pretty useless IMO.
I started going through each composer and so many of them were unknown, barely sourced/dead sources, no website, no music online, recently graduated college, etc.
I flagged a handful of pages and all of them were rejected for deletion. Sometimes the page creators popped out of the blue and fought me on it (and got to vote on the page remaining). I think someone of them had direct connections with the composer.
There are so many tiny pages dedicated to forever-invisible composers, it's awful.
If all you want is to have a copy of what you wrote, you can ask a Wikipedia admin to temporarily undelete the page (perhaps moving it to your user space). If the reason for deletion was just that the subject was not notable enough, I see no reason for not doing that.
I'm not too familiar with Wikipedia policy specifically, but most likely, if you start out by creating the article in your user space (User:$yourUsername/whatever or Special:MyPage/whatever, Special:MyPage will redirect you to User:$yourUsername, including subpages) then that version won't get touched, user sandboxes on most wikis are exactly that and kinda your own space.
I don't understand why, a decade and a half ago, or however long past it was that deletionism started to over overtook inclusionism (after which I quit editing), that they didn't just decide to move "unnotable" content to another mediawiki namespace. The pros works have outweighed the cons, given the cultural memory blackhole situation that has arisen.
Often enough, particularly in "controversial" topics, the information I want is in the Talk pages rather than the heavily guarded article.
This worked great in the past. More recently I discovered some sort of policy must have changed, which allows Talk pages to be archived/deleted, effectively destroying any evidence of a controversy.
A little story some may find amusing and possibly pertinent: many years back one of the Wikipedia editors said something really silly. Silly enough it got reported on. So… I went to see if they had a Wikipedia page. And, of course they did. Despite the fact that they were, objectively, not notable.
So, I did the decent thing and, in a “Haha, only serious” fashion updated the article to include easily the most notable thing they had ever done. Even provided multiple citations and everything.
I mean, everyone here knows what happened next. I didn’t expend any more energy on it.
(For the record, when I say silly I mean it, it was mildly embarrassing, offended no-one and wasn’t problematic in any way.)
This story is elliptical to the point of unintelligibility. Nobody knows what happened next. We can guess a page was deleted from the context of this thread, but we have no idea why.
The motivation for hiding the history of deleted Wikipedia articles is to minimize legal complaints. E.g. if something is libelous or a copyright violation, they want to remove it.
Do you think an admin, with some programming knowledge, could write a program to scrape all of the deleted pages on Wikipedia and store them in some public archive for people to view?
I'm sure it goes against their terms of service, but it would be really great for getting rid of censorship.
I'm so glad to see that this exists. The world needs this. I can't tell you how many times I wished that I had the time and energy to set this up myself. It's such a tragedy for hard work and human knowledge to disappear into the void just because radical deletionists managed to take over Wikipedia.
The only thing that would make me happier would be if us Inclusionists could get organized, get our shit together, and kick the Deletionist camp on Wikipedia right in the teeth (metaphorically speaking) and shift the tide.
There's been quite a lot of techie related content - pages for programming languages, OSS projects, etc. that were deleted as a result of the overly aggressive deletion policies, IMO. No, I'm not going to give you a list though, because I'm not interested in spending my time here arguing over the minutia of whether or not a given page is "really notable". Not wanting to waste my time on that crap is one reason I rarely edit WP anymore, and I'm not going to re-engage in that here. You can find your own examples, or simply disregard my blathering, it's all the same to me either way.
There's a group that calls themselves "Guerrilla Skeptics" that worked hard over several years to delete the article about David R. Hawkins (and here's where I would normally link to his Wikipedia article...)
The page itself was deleted, but there's a "Deletion log" about the page where you can see it get restored and deleted back and forth, and read the discussions.
I don't think that this being around 9 years and not being noticed has any bearing on whether the world needs this. There are plenty of things that you and I have no idea exist but nonetheless serve important functions.
There's all kinds of things that I've wanted that I've not known where to find them. So telling people that something's been available really has no import on how much they want/need something.
Appears to be a legitimate bank in Cambodia ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV-9E1_1bXE ). Deleted from the English Wikipedia for lacking "notability". I believe the real issue was the people verifying notability didn't speak Khmer.
Actual rapper, deleted twice from Wikipedia apparently because he's "only notable for dying". His YouTube videos have millions of views, he's mentioned in various music magazines and the Washington Post. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/3pac
Deletion from Wikipedia doesn't mean you don't exist or aren't "a legitimate bank". It means you're not a good subject for the encyclopedia. There are tiny banks all over Chicagoland that don't have Wikipedia pages, and shouldn't.
As for 3Pac, he's mentioned in various music magazines for dying. I might have made the opposite call if I'd been AfD'ing when this was deleted, and I preemptively agree that Wikipedia's policies are tuned for a ~2000s conception of what reliable sources establishing notability are --- 2018 Wikipedia was probably overly skeptical of Youtube fame. But the decision here isn't arbitrary.
Again, you have to understand the policies before you can reasonably critique them. You don't have to agree with their rationales, but you do have to demonstrate that you know what they are, or at least not betray that you don't.
ABA is one of the top banks in Cambodia according to a quick Google search. Comparing it to "tiny banks all over Chicagoland" is unfair. One of a countries top banks should be covered by Wikipedia.
And I have participated in AfDs on Wikipedia before, so I do know something about the policies. That's why I chose these two in particular. Could you show me the policy that says 3Pac isn't notable because the news coverage was based upon his death? He was also mentioned in the Washington Post before his death, albeit very briefly.
Deletionists claim that only non notable articles get removed, yet a couple months ago I encountered someone wanting to delete the article on DokuWiki.
DOKUWIKI!
Someone had a spreadsheet full of links talking about DokuWiki that were poo pooed because the articles didn't have someone claiming to have an editor on them, the fact that a 2018 book was written on DokuWiki wasn't enough, nor was the 80 page views per day average usage of the page.
The thing that saved the second most popular wiki software aside from mediawiki itself were additional comments about references to DW in other books, as well as one of the original deletist voters withdrawing in order to avoid some sort of sealioning potential optics, something I can't fully follow but seems only tangentially related.
I love Wikipedia to pieces, but I have given up trying to contribute to it, because only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police. I assume these are many of the same people as the Deletion Police. A pox on all their houses.
What kind of thing have I had reverted? For example, often when I have just watched a film, I like to read its Wikipedia page. Often I spot minor errors in the plot synopsis while the details are fresh in my mind, and make minor edits to fix those errors. Often, they get reverted. So now I don't bother.
Reverters and deleters may achieve what Big Content longed to do but couldn't -- kill Wikipedia.
People say things like this, and I believe them. But can you provide some examples of edits you've made that didn't "survive the Reversion Police"? One very good thing about Wikipedia is that most of what happens on it is logged; Wikipedia Jurisprudence works for the most part the way people HN say real jurisprudence should work: with version control. Let's talk about specific examples! You should have a bunch, given what you just wrote.
Most of Wikipedia --- probably the most intellectually impressive project on the entire global Internet --- was built during the reign of the deletionists, just in case you're concerned about them "killing" the project.
Wikipedia is like, well, a lot of social knowledge tools where there's special roles (e.g., Stack Overflow, GitHub projects) - some people build prestige by contributing content, some people seek to build prestige by gatekeeping the contributions of others.
Good. I have seen editors exclude articles on actual public figures — multiple (credible) books published, academic publications, interviews on mainstream media — as being "irrelevant", "unimportant", etc., etc., all seemingly because, when the editor's chain of edits is examined, that person took a position with with the editor strongly politically or policy-wise disagreed with on the strongest terms. The editor system is one of Wikipedia's greatest weaknesses — people with bones to pick and hills to die on work to exclude even mainstream views with which they disagree, and there is no way to stop them from running amok. Something really needs to be done about this.
I'm kinda wondering about future. I can well imagine that some current minor minister of a country is notable enough for now, but what about 10 or 20 years in future? Will their articles just end up deleted? Even if they were perfectly good and factual?
Notability is not time limited on Wikipedia. Wikipedia notability guidelines on politicians states that members of national level legislative bodies are automatically notable, so the articles will stay as long as Wikipedia in all likelihood.
I wonder if a editor action review process would help here. If reviewers were themselves reviewed for their actions, and promoted/demoted based on their adherence to a set of public guidelines.
...for example, deleting an article that you took a political position on - should get you demoted from being a reviewer in general.
I read through wikipedia AfD occasionally for fun (yeah, I know, I'm a weirdo). I'm not going to say it's never happened ever, but I've never noticed an AfD that ended up with a delete consensus that was obviously started due to an editor's political bias.
Can you provide examples to substantiate this claim?
> (I would go into more detail, but I'll be flagged to oblivion, as this is also the prevailing opinion on this site too.)
It's the opposite, not supporting your claim with evidence when it should be straightforward to do so is what's going to get you flagged into oblivion.
>If the article is retained on Wikipedia the article is emptied on Deletionpedia.
That doesn't necessarily seem to always be the case. Though it apparently was on other pages. For the second article that got randomly served to me (Aixa de la Cruz), it was proposed for deletion but kept. Citrine (programming language) is another.
While I'm largely on the inclusionist side of the fence, I have to admit that most of the pages I flipped through were either very thin, probably had legitimate notability issues, and/or were probably self-promotional.
Yeah this is a really hard problem. There is stuff that legit should be deleted because it's either BS or spam. I somewhat wish there was a setting like "show dead" that HN has.
That was not my experience when clicking on "random page" a couple dozen times for fun.
Store chains that went out of business. Airliner crashes with substantial property loss and injury but no fatalities. Abandoned software that was moderately influential in the past. Hardware that's no longer manufactured and someone wants to memory hole it. Schools that nobody "cool enough" graduated from, but obviously a lot of regular people graduated from. I hit exactly one individual out of perhaps 25 articles and he was a minor league professional soccer athlete, actually kind of surprised he got deleted, you would think superfans of the team would rally to keep that kind of info.
It was all the kind of stuff where someone with a reason to research would be painfully inconvenienced by its removal or someone with a personal connection would feel bad if it were deleted. The work of the usual people on the internet whom get off on making people feel bad. None of it was literally useless in the sense of lists of serial numbers of dollar bills by year number or similar. Actually if an article like that, if it existed, would be a gold mine for someone trying to research anti-counterfeiting technologies or someone being paid to write anti-counterfeiting software or a coin collector trying to verify authenticity of a collectible, so I'm sure people whom get off on causing others pain would push HARD to delete an article like that and would enjoy the resulting feeling of having caused pain.
> Abandoned software that was moderately influential in the past. Hardware that's no longer manufactured and someone wants to memory hole it.
This one is a bit surprising to me. From my perspective, wikipedia seems to have a strong computer nerd bias. There are articles about obscure text editors that have probably only been used by a few dozen people in the last 30 years, but if you try looking up information about industrial/construction hardware (blue collar stuff..) the articles are often very short (when they exist at all) and often don't have history sections.
There are a lot of issues around notability, not least of all the availability of third party sources which varies by a ton of things including pre-and post- internet notability. But also the nature of their or its notability. On the one hand, you likely have articles on fairly minor actors and pro athletes and you probably don't have articles on many tenured professors at major universities even though they're pretty much by definition notable in their fields--but there may not have been much written about them as a person.
No. I try to add wikipedia for Open Source Software that are used in many places but that aren't giant and not well known outside of tech circles, and they get deleted, typically for lack of noteriety or not enough external references, sometimes 5 or 6 years later.
Exactly. What the Deletionists seem to miss is the extent to which their entire position is based on negativity, and how that negativity poisons the well for everybody. Imagine spending hours, or days, or weeks writing a detailed, well-documented, heavily-interlinked, high-quality page only to have it shot in the head in a Deletionist Driveby. Would you ever edit another Wikipedia page again after an experience like that?
Meanwhile Wikipedia's own policies are violated with the comprehensive detailed list of Pokemon and sub-articles that really belongs on a dedicated wiki.
I agree, there are a ridiculous number of vanity pages on Wikipedia and quite frankly, grossly inconsistent enforcement. Wikipedia is being used as a tool for building a personal profile and achieve SEO goals around Google searches for particular people's name.
My particular pet peeve are the surprising number of bios of wealthy people who have done absolutely nothing remarkable or noteworthy other than be exceptionally successful at marketing themselves, which allows them to get their name pop up in the occasional mainstream media article. Of course those mentions are just churnalism in a puff section of the newspaper, cobbled together from quotes ripped out of a press release. But apparently that's enough to satisfy "notability". And of course these articles are almost always predominantly maintained by single purpose accounts; most likely sock puppets of the person in question.
Shame they don't seem to have a copy of the Bear versus Lion article. Wikipedia still has Tiger versus Lion and articles for Bear-baiting and Lion-baiting, but the Bear versus Lion article seems to be lost. Archive.org doesn't even have it. I'm quite sure it once existed though.
Thus site really helps to establish one's position on deleteionist vs inclusioninst debate.
Internet arguments often choose the example of deleted articles to illustrate their point, so one cannot get overall "feel" of the quality of delete pages. But hitting "Random Page" link on that website shows a nice, unbiased random sample.
"I don't get why they would do this to so many topics."
Self-promotion and non-notable content.
Pretty early in Wikipedia's existence all sorts of spammers and non-entities realized that they could use Wikipedia as their personal advertising billboard.
Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too. For example, you could, arguably, have an article about every one of the 7 billion people on the planet and about what foods each of them like, etc.
Inclusionists might like all such articles to be included, but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted.
Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too.
Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia though, not in any traditional sense. Just because they use that word in the byline doesn't mean that it makes sense to pretend that Wikipedia is a 1980's door-to-door-salesperson bound edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. And in the same sense, it makes no sense to try and apply the same standards and policies from an outdated legacy media format to an entirely new media format.
but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted.
The problem with this mind-set is the idea that there is some objective, universally applicable idea of what it means to be "non notable". There isn't.
Looking at some deleted articles [1], I do get it. There seem to be hundreds of articles of asteroids which consist of only a few sentences. A lot of small or already defunct startup companies, small indie-bands and their albums etc.
Take a look through what is deleted, it's mostly junk. In my experience Wikipedia could stand to be more aggressive with its pruning. Low quality articles waste your time because you have to read them for a bit before you realize it is worthless.
It's worth noting that Wikidata has far more inclusive standards than any Wikipedia, though it still excludes true vanity submissions. Many of these deleted items could get a Wikidata entry if they don't have one already.
The only times I've felt frustration looking up things and finding them deleted was like some minor god from mythology of which there likely wasn't much written as there isn't much known anywhere TBH
Having started to occasionally edit stuff on Wikipedia over the pandemic, I have a newfound understanding of the reasons for deleting stuff.
As a casual user, you will, by definition, tend to see the most-trafficked, well-maintained pages. Deleted pages, as a general rule, are not those. Your impression of the level of quality that can be achieved is completely off. This is also true if you read a lot in some specialized subject that has a small, but active and productive community (some pop culture fandoms, for example).
Leave the beaten paths at your own risk, especially if it concerns anything that has small communities with differences of opinion. Like foreign wars.
This isn't the worst I've seen, but something I remembered because I tried to clean it up recently. It includes a long discussion that has little to do with the subject, is obviously the product of a tug-of-war between opposing POVs and fails to present the subject in a way that would allow the reader to come to any conclusion. Or, at least, I still have no idea if this guy is a war criminal, hero, or both.
And this is the stuff that doesn't get deleted.
The other standard is obviously self-serving content, i. e. articles written by the subject or the subject's employees/PR people etc. There is simply no way to deal with the fundamental problem that an article's subject always has far more interest in an article than any random editor without limiting the scope to subjects that attract at least a few interested editors without a conflict of interest.
There are a tremendous amount of defamatory hit pieces that show up too. I wonder in a S230 analysis if deletionpedia itself is the publisher of this material: after all, it wasn't the original author that went and dug it up and published it on their site. I hope they've received good legal advice.
My first taste of Wikipedia’s controversial policies was on an entry for the song “Regulate” by rapper Warren G. Someone posted a synopsis of the lyrics which various Wikipedia editors found “clinical to the point of parody” (paraphrasing) and thus worthy of reversion. I have never been able to look at Wikipedia the same since.
What's wrong with reverting content that isn't relevant for the encyclopedic format of Wikipedia? A decent example of this might be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempted_(Squeeze_song)#Backg..., which goes into the background of the song without analyzing every lyric. Save that for Genius.
I remember when a historian who wanted to correct common misceptions in articles would have his updates reverted. The common views are not always correct. Such as Canada didn't have troops in Vietnam. Canada had MASH medical units, and theres even a canadian webpage listing medals award and names who served in Vietnam.
He finally kept his updates on his personal page, but then wikipedia made it you couldnt find his page.
Then I started finding that was the common idea on Wikipedia, deleting views from wikipedia that didnt meet the popular editors. Pages got deleted with rules that didnt make sense, not popular enough, not reported by main stream news, no articles found, etc.
I'm old enough to remember news and events that counter the popular views, and those events are not even in historical news articles. The re-writing of history has been going on in wikipedia launched, its more common than you think.
My favorite wikpedia fake excuse, they dont have enough space to include non-popular historical events, its history, authors who trended all the talk shows even oprah and made nytimes best seller, etc, are removed from history.
Theres entire mainstream history in 80's that don't match reality, and was deleted. The narrative of groups in charge, are the ones who get reported.
This is undoubtedly so, but the point of wikipedia is to record the common view. The criterion for inclusion is acceptance in the mainstream sources, not truth.
Pages are technically technical debt. I understand why unpopular topics are not maintained. I've not seen anything that would suggest something systematic (especially cross language).
Can you elaborate about the active effort you suspect exists? (Rewriting implies authorship)
Are you sure you're not talking about Red Cross teams from Canada (not exactly Canadian troops).
> and theres even a canadian webpage listing medals award and names who served in Vietnam.
Aren't you talking about Canadian recipients of US medals (because they joined the US military)?
There were also those involved with the ICCS during the US withdrawal, various defense companies who sent contractors to work on equipment in Vietnam for their US customers, etc.
The Wikipedia article for Michael Aquino would be a great one to see added here. Lt Colonel in the US Army who wrote a seminal paper on psychological operations, had close ties to the highest levels of NATO command in Europe, performed a ritual with an SS dagger at Wewelsburg Castle in Germany, and was an outspoken Satanist who was credibly accused of child abuse in the Presidio daycare scandal. One can see why a lot of people might not mind that his page was deleted and now redirects to "Temple of Set."
Damn, I'm surprised they deleted his page. He was a real nutjob, but a notable nutjob. I have a pdf of one of his books about psyops archived somewhere.
Would be interesting if there was an easy way to find “controversial” pages. If a page has a significant amount of edits or discussions prior to deletion for example.
More and more it feels like the death of Wikipedia is coming and maybe that's a good thing, thus making space for the next "Wikipedia" that could improve on many shortcomings of the current implementation.
It happens so often on the internet that people who lack competency to be a just moderator, end up being moderators and then abusing the power that was entrusted to them, without any consequences...
As a teenager ~18 years ago, I joined ADW (Association of Deletionist Wikipedians) and I was very proud of myself. We took down a lot of personal vanity pages, per the Wikipedia is An Encyclopedia policy (at odds with the Wikipedia is Not Paper policy). I also led the push to get a lot of pokemon pages deleted as not notable. I'm not sure how I feel about all that now. Deleting the vanity pages that people put up about themselves probably improved the platform, but the pokemon were harmless.
I've noticed that one article which was marked for deletion on Wikipedia is marked as "hooray survived deletionism" on deletionpedia, but only got changed to a redirect after a lot of data was deleted.
For more on Wikipedia's slow transformation from a culture of inclusionism to one of deletionism, see Gwern's fantastic "In Defense of Inclusionism" here: https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism
There is not point currently in trying to fix an error when you read an article in Wikipedia. In the 99% of the cases is reverted automatically when you quit the page to keep the wrong statement. The momentum when it was cool to help there has passed.
Unfortunately deletionpedia only grabs pages that are previously marked on Wikipedia in some way. The disappearing tech-related articles I've been looking for (smaller programming languages, "Quote notation") can't be found there.
Whatever happened to the critics who ran a protest site called Wikitruth? Did it go offline? Was there some controversy? I'd check their Wikipedia page but they really don't have one.
Deleted articles aren't THAT big an issue, since most articles that get deleted are crap (there are exceptions). Maybe more important is idiots reverting good edits or otherwise removing info from articles, without the articles themselves getting deleted. The info is thus retained in the edit history, but it's harder to programatically recover, because: the context changes in later editing; it's hard to distinguish information removal from ordinary editing/rewriting; there are tons of automated edits that are just plain noise with no clear way to distinguish them from human edits, etc. I've been wanting to spend some time on this some day.
Wikipedia deleted the entry for a company called Rosemont Seneca Partners which was the financial firm of the younger son of Joe Biden, i.e. Hunter Biden.
The stated reasoning behind the deletion was that it is not a notable company.
This company is discussed extensively in the emails recovered from the laptop of Hunter Biden. News of these emails was censored by Twitter and Facebook just before the 2020 election. It is widely believed by millions (including the new owner of Twitter) that this was a partisan move. Jack Dorsey has remarked that this was a mistake that he rectified as soon as he came to learn of it, which was several weeks after the censorship.
At the time of the news story, Facebook announced that they were "reducing the spread" of this story. The move was announced by Andy Stone, who is and was the erstwhile head of communications at Meta, and also by total coincidence, was previously a staff member for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, and "House Majority PAC", a political action group whose stated mission is to ensure the majority of the Democratic Party in the US House of Representatives.
One of the people in the emails was Tony Bobulinski - a former US Navy Seal Lieutenant. He clarified the context in one of the emails which referenced a "10%" cut for the "big guy". This was a reference to current President Joe Biden, per Bobulinski.
Over a year after the election, the Washington Post confirmed the authenticity of the emails from the laptop. Facebook's aforementioned Andy Stone announced at the time that stories about the contents of the email were "eligible for checking by third party fact-checkers" and that the spread of the story would be reduced until they returned a verdict. Stone has announced no verdict thus far.
Many are quick to point to the Streisand effect when discussing this topic, which while relevant, does not address the apparent coordinated nature of the censorship behind this story, wherein the same incorrect conclusion was drawn by multiple parties on the basis of no evidence.
This is the type of thing we see happening in third world countries quite often, where the government and the ruling party have an iron grip over the media. Just this week we have seen governments cut off internet access entirely as an effort to curb the spread of disinformation. To see first world countries engaging in similar behavior leaves one with little hope for the future of democratic rule.
A quick search for "1948 Arab Israeli War" shows several links from US and pro-Israel sources using the term, which seems to be a relatively neutral way to refer to it:
While the term British-American War is not in active use, I don't think either side would have any problem with it. It's not like there is any secret the Americans were fighting against the British.
My favorite example of this is when Apple renamed Mac OS X to "macOS", someone went around and retroactively renamed nearly every mention of "OS X" on Wikipedia to "macOS" even in situations where it makes absolutely no sense, as "macOS" did not exist during the topic/time period which the article references.
English Wikipedia is written from PoV of English sources (and therefore English-speaking countries). It should use a name that is most common in those countries.
No offense, as long as the titles match what is used in English media (for English wikipedia) and even lists other common names in the lede, then that's fine. Also redirect from other known names. Being offended by lack of content is one thing, being offended by a different title than you expect is a bit much.
I can understand why wiki articles get deleted. What I cannot understand is why their edit history is also deleted. If part of an article is deleted, one can still find it in the article history. But if the article is deleted entirely, there is no way to check what used to be there.
I found this remarkable irritating myself. I created a Wikipedia page recently for a former TV host, and current podcaster I really enjoy. He's written several books and is cited by other people. I've certainly seen much less noteworthy people having Wikipedia pages.
I spent several hours gathering sources and put together a decent little Wikipedia page. It was voted as being not-noteworthy and removed. I didn't realize all my citations were going to go with it. Wasn't up long enough even to get picked up by the wayback machine.
The “notability” criterion on Wikipedia is remarkably slippery.
In theory, it is objective. There should be no real question about it. It is a synonym for something like “evidenceable,” “researchable,” or “verifiable.” Something is ‘notable’ according not to subjective perception but rather whether you can find third party sources to corroborate basic details. Notability is about the problem of, “You said this podcaster’s real name was X Quasimodo Mogadishu, the X is not short for anything, his literal first name is the letter X... That looks a lot like vandalism to me, is there a third party source that I can consult to confirm if this was vandalism or reality?” If such details are unverifiable, we filethe subject of the article as “not notable” and delete the page until that changes.
In practice, the word is so pliable that it is bent into whatever shape the moderators desire. I have heard “well, this guy is notable in the such-and-so community, just not on the world stage.” my response, “What?! What on earth does that have to do with me finding third party sources to confirm what facts I am seeing in this article? Like, are you saying that the third party sources are encoded in hopeless amounts of jargon such that it is no longer English?” met silence, because of course that's not the point, the point is that the admins can reinvent the definition of notability as they see fit.
Don't feel bad that you got burned. The basic problem is that Wikipedia is a democracy, and democratic governance requires politics, and you came into the situation as a political outsider. Of course it didn't go your way, it only goes your way if you are lucky.
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Interesting that you've had problems with someone with that many sources/public image.
My project has stalled, but there was a point when I was putting together a Wikipedia page for notable composers of the 20th and 21st century. I came up with some criteria that would filter out most of the composers listed on their respective "list of 20th century composers" and "list of 21st century composers". If you haven't seen these lists, they are HUGE and thus pretty useless IMO.
I started going through each composer and so many of them were unknown, barely sourced/dead sources, no website, no music online, recently graduated college, etc.
I flagged a handful of pages and all of them were rejected for deletion. Sometimes the page creators popped out of the blue and fought me on it (and got to vote on the page remaining). I think someone of them had direct connections with the composer.
There are so many tiny pages dedicated to forever-invisible composers, it's awful.
You can see my progress here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:List_of_20th-_and_21st-c...
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As my sibling comments say, you can ask for it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:REFUND
Also it being deleted once doesn't mean it can't ever be made. May be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:TOOSOON for it. Working on it in your draft space and maybe using the articles for creation process if you want more help. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AFC
For future reference, you can instantly archive a page via: https://web.archive.org/save.
If you create an account and log in, it will also give you an option to archive any page linked to by that page, as well.
If all you want is to have a copy of what you wrote, you can ask a Wikipedia admin to temporarily undelete the page (perhaps moving it to your user space). If the reason for deletion was just that the subject was not notable enough, I see no reason for not doing that.
I'm not too familiar with Wikipedia policy specifically, but most likely, if you start out by creating the article in your user space (User:$yourUsername/whatever or Special:MyPage/whatever, Special:MyPage will redirect you to User:$yourUsername, including subpages) then that version won't get touched, user sandboxes on most wikis are exactly that and kinda your own space.
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I don't understand why, a decade and a half ago, or however long past it was that deletionism started to over overtook inclusionism (after which I quit editing), that they didn't just decide to move "unnotable" content to another mediawiki namespace. The pros works have outweighed the cons, given the cultural memory blackhole situation that has arisen.
I think you could ask an admin for a copy of the deleted article. On my small home wiki, such a request would be fulfilled without any trouble.
you can ask for a refund (https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:REFUND) and they'll email your article back to with citations.
What was the article title?
There will always be self righteous gatekeepers.
This is the inevitable result of centralized control.
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Echoing a similar concern over Talk pages.
Often enough, particularly in "controversial" topics, the information I want is in the Talk pages rather than the heavily guarded article.
This worked great in the past. More recently I discovered some sort of policy must have changed, which allows Talk pages to be archived/deleted, effectively destroying any evidence of a controversy.
A little story some may find amusing and possibly pertinent: many years back one of the Wikipedia editors said something really silly. Silly enough it got reported on. So… I went to see if they had a Wikipedia page. And, of course they did. Despite the fact that they were, objectively, not notable.
So, I did the decent thing and, in a “Haha, only serious” fashion updated the article to include easily the most notable thing they had ever done. Even provided multiple citations and everything.
I mean, everyone here knows what happened next. I didn’t expend any more energy on it.
(For the record, when I say silly I mean it, it was mildly embarrassing, offended no-one and wasn’t problematic in any way.)
This story is elliptical to the point of unintelligibility. Nobody knows what happened next. We can guess a page was deleted from the context of this thread, but we have no idea why.
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Were you trying to Disrupt Wikipedia To Make A Point of some sort? %-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Do_not_disrupt_Wikip...
You probably got into a modicum of trouble then. I'd love to look up what you actually did. (If only to learn what not to do)
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The history isn't removed, but its only visible to Wikipedia admins.
That is even more damning - it does not even allow the "saving storage space" excuse.
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The motivation for hiding the history of deleted Wikipedia articles is to minimize legal complaints. E.g. if something is libelous or a copyright violation, they want to remove it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Viewing_deleted_cont...
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Do you think an admin, with some programming knowledge, could write a program to scrape all of the deleted pages on Wikipedia and store them in some public archive for people to view?
I'm sure it goes against their terms of service, but it would be really great for getting rid of censorship.
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Factually accurate, but not any better for the public.
Simple: keeping deleted stuff actually deleted / invisibled keeps Wikipedia from a bunch of lawsuits - in particular, DMCA and libel/defamation laws.
Wiki or Wikipedia?
Because otherwise there’s no point in removing anything.
I'm so glad to see that this exists. The world needs this. I can't tell you how many times I wished that I had the time and energy to set this up myself. It's such a tragedy for hard work and human knowledge to disappear into the void just because radical deletionists managed to take over Wikipedia.
The only thing that would make me happier would be if us Inclusionists could get organized, get our shit together, and kick the Deletionist camp on Wikipedia right in the teeth (metaphorically speaking) and shift the tide.
> It's such a tragedy for hard work and human knowledge to disappear into the void just because radical deletionists managed to take over Wikipedia.
After browsing the site and seeing mostly crap, I'm genuinely curious: do you have examples of content erroneously evicted by radical deletionists?
There's been quite a lot of techie related content - pages for programming languages, OSS projects, etc. that were deleted as a result of the overly aggressive deletion policies, IMO. No, I'm not going to give you a list though, because I'm not interested in spending my time here arguing over the minutia of whether or not a given page is "really notable". Not wanting to waste my time on that crap is one reason I rarely edit WP anymore, and I'm not going to re-engage in that here. You can find your own examples, or simply disregard my blathering, it's all the same to me either way.
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There's a group that calls themselves "Guerrilla Skeptics" that worked hard over several years to delete the article about David R. Hawkins (and here's where I would normally link to his Wikipedia article...)
The page itself was deleted, but there's a "Deletion log" about the page where you can see it get restored and deleted back and forth, and read the discussions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delet...
Meanwhile, in Germany: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_R._Hawkins
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https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/political-deletionism-at-w...
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This has existed since 2013[0]. If you haven't noticed it in nine years, how much did the world really need this?
[0]: https://deletionpedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&offset...
I don't think that this being around 9 years and not being noticed has any bearing on whether the world needs this. There are plenty of things that you and I have no idea exist but nonetheless serve important functions.
I'm always amazed at how quickly we became a pro-censorship society. I always assumed it would take several generations.
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There's all kinds of things that I've wanted that I've not known where to find them. So telling people that something's been available really has no import on how much they want/need something.
There are a ton of things that were created years or decades before they became popular or useful. That's ridiculous logic.
LSTMs were around for about 17 years before they revolutionised NLP.
Here's some examples:
https://deletionpedia.org/en/ABA_Bank
Appears to be a legitimate bank in Cambodia ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV-9E1_1bXE ). Deleted from the English Wikipedia for lacking "notability". I believe the real issue was the people verifying notability didn't speak Khmer.
https://deletionpedia.org/en/3Pac
Actual rapper, deleted twice from Wikipedia apparently because he's "only notable for dying". His YouTube videos have millions of views, he's mentioned in various music magazines and the Washington Post. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/3pac
Deletion from Wikipedia doesn't mean you don't exist or aren't "a legitimate bank". It means you're not a good subject for the encyclopedia. There are tiny banks all over Chicagoland that don't have Wikipedia pages, and shouldn't.
As for 3Pac, he's mentioned in various music magazines for dying. I might have made the opposite call if I'd been AfD'ing when this was deleted, and I preemptively agree that Wikipedia's policies are tuned for a ~2000s conception of what reliable sources establishing notability are --- 2018 Wikipedia was probably overly skeptical of Youtube fame. But the decision here isn't arbitrary.
Again, you have to understand the policies before you can reasonably critique them. You don't have to agree with their rationales, but you do have to demonstrate that you know what they are, or at least not betray that you don't.
ABA is one of the top banks in Cambodia according to a quick Google search. Comparing it to "tiny banks all over Chicagoland" is unfair. One of a countries top banks should be covered by Wikipedia.
And I have participated in AfDs on Wikipedia before, so I do know something about the policies. That's why I chose these two in particular. Could you show me the policy that says 3Pac isn't notable because the news coverage was based upon his death? He was also mentioned in the Washington Post before his death, albeit very briefly.
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Deletionists claim that only non notable articles get removed, yet a couple months ago I encountered someone wanting to delete the article on DokuWiki.
DOKUWIKI!
Someone had a spreadsheet full of links talking about DokuWiki that were poo pooed because the articles didn't have someone claiming to have an editor on them, the fact that a 2018 book was written on DokuWiki wasn't enough, nor was the 80 page views per day average usage of the page.
The thing that saved the second most popular wiki software aside from mediawiki itself were additional comments about references to DW in other books, as well as one of the original deletist voters withdrawing in order to avoid some sort of sealioning potential optics, something I can't fully follow but seems only tangentially related.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_delet...
I love Wikipedia to pieces, but I have given up trying to contribute to it, because only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police. I assume these are many of the same people as the Deletion Police. A pox on all their houses.
What kind of thing have I had reverted? For example, often when I have just watched a film, I like to read its Wikipedia page. Often I spot minor errors in the plot synopsis while the details are fresh in my mind, and make minor edits to fix those errors. Often, they get reverted. So now I don't bother.
Reverters and deleters may achieve what Big Content longed to do but couldn't -- kill Wikipedia.
People say things like this, and I believe them. But can you provide some examples of edits you've made that didn't "survive the Reversion Police"? One very good thing about Wikipedia is that most of what happens on it is logged; Wikipedia Jurisprudence works for the most part the way people HN say real jurisprudence should work: with version control. Let's talk about specific examples! You should have a bunch, given what you just wrote.
Most of Wikipedia --- probably the most intellectually impressive project on the entire global Internet --- was built during the reign of the deletionists, just in case you're concerned about them "killing" the project.
> only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police.
Could you provide three examples?
Huh, do you think the parent comment was lying?
Wikipedia is like, well, a lot of social knowledge tools where there's special roles (e.g., Stack Overflow, GitHub projects) - some people build prestige by contributing content, some people seek to build prestige by gatekeeping the contributions of others.
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Good. I have seen editors exclude articles on actual public figures — multiple (credible) books published, academic publications, interviews on mainstream media — as being "irrelevant", "unimportant", etc., etc., all seemingly because, when the editor's chain of edits is examined, that person took a position with with the editor strongly politically or policy-wise disagreed with on the strongest terms. The editor system is one of Wikipedia's greatest weaknesses — people with bones to pick and hills to die on work to exclude even mainstream views with which they disagree, and there is no way to stop them from running amok. Something really needs to be done about this.
I'm kinda wondering about future. I can well imagine that some current minor minister of a country is notable enough for now, but what about 10 or 20 years in future? Will their articles just end up deleted? Even if they were perfectly good and factual?
Notability is not time limited on Wikipedia. Wikipedia notability guidelines on politicians states that members of national level legislative bodies are automatically notable, so the articles will stay as long as Wikipedia in all likelihood.
I wonder if a editor action review process would help here. If reviewers were themselves reviewed for their actions, and promoted/demoted based on their adherence to a set of public guidelines.
...for example, deleting an article that you took a political position on - should get you demoted from being a reviewer in general.
I read through wikipedia AfD occasionally for fun (yeah, I know, I'm a weirdo). I'm not going to say it's never happened ever, but I've never noticed an AfD that ended up with a delete consensus that was obviously started due to an editor's political bias.
Can you provide examples to substantiate this claim?
Sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/female-scientists-pages-...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wikipedia-bias-1.6129073
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> (I would go into more detail, but I'll be flagged to oblivion, as this is also the prevailing opinion on this site too.)
It's the opposite, not supporting your claim with evidence when it should be straightforward to do so is what's going to get you flagged into oblivion.
> (I would go into more detail, but I'll be flagged to oblivion, as this is also the prevailing opinion on this site too.)
You're on a throwaway account. That's not a valid excuse.
Difflinks or it didn't happen.
>If the article is retained on Wikipedia the article is emptied on Deletionpedia.
That doesn't necessarily seem to always be the case. Though it apparently was on other pages. For the second article that got randomly served to me (Aixa de la Cruz), it was proposed for deletion but kept. Citrine (programming language) is another.
While I'm largely on the inclusionist side of the fence, I have to admit that most of the pages I flipped through were either very thin, probably had legitimate notability issues, and/or were probably self-promotional.
Yeah this is a really hard problem. There is stuff that legit should be deleted because it's either BS or spam. I somewhat wish there was a setting like "show dead" that HN has.
These are mostly vanity pages for people. Now if I add myself to wikipedia, it will at least end up somewhere!
That was not my experience when clicking on "random page" a couple dozen times for fun.
Store chains that went out of business. Airliner crashes with substantial property loss and injury but no fatalities. Abandoned software that was moderately influential in the past. Hardware that's no longer manufactured and someone wants to memory hole it. Schools that nobody "cool enough" graduated from, but obviously a lot of regular people graduated from. I hit exactly one individual out of perhaps 25 articles and he was a minor league professional soccer athlete, actually kind of surprised he got deleted, you would think superfans of the team would rally to keep that kind of info.
It was all the kind of stuff where someone with a reason to research would be painfully inconvenienced by its removal or someone with a personal connection would feel bad if it were deleted. The work of the usual people on the internet whom get off on making people feel bad. None of it was literally useless in the sense of lists of serial numbers of dollar bills by year number or similar. Actually if an article like that, if it existed, would be a gold mine for someone trying to research anti-counterfeiting technologies or someone being paid to write anti-counterfeiting software or a coin collector trying to verify authenticity of a collectible, so I'm sure people whom get off on causing others pain would push HARD to delete an article like that and would enjoy the resulting feeling of having caused pain.
> Abandoned software that was moderately influential in the past. Hardware that's no longer manufactured and someone wants to memory hole it.
This one is a bit surprising to me. From my perspective, wikipedia seems to have a strong computer nerd bias. There are articles about obscure text editors that have probably only been used by a few dozen people in the last 30 years, but if you try looking up information about industrial/construction hardware (blue collar stuff..) the articles are often very short (when they exist at all) and often don't have history sections.
There are a lot of issues around notability, not least of all the availability of third party sources which varies by a ton of things including pre-and post- internet notability. But also the nature of their or its notability. On the one hand, you likely have articles on fairly minor actors and pro athletes and you probably don't have articles on many tenured professors at major universities even though they're pretty much by definition notable in their fields--but there may not have been much written about them as a person.
Here are yesterday's AfD's on actual Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
These are the borderline calls; Deletionpedia is a subset of this stuff, as it apparently captures the speedy deletes, which are much worse.
No. I try to add wikipedia for Open Source Software that are used in many places but that aren't giant and not well known outside of tech circles, and they get deleted, typically for lack of noteriety or not enough external references, sometimes 5 or 6 years later.
It is very discouraging.
It is very discouraging.
Exactly. What the Deletionists seem to miss is the extent to which their entire position is based on negativity, and how that negativity poisons the well for everybody. Imagine spending hours, or days, or weeks writing a detailed, well-documented, heavily-interlinked, high-quality page only to have it shot in the head in a Deletionist Driveby. Would you ever edit another Wikipedia page again after an experience like that?
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Nim had to face the deletion nazis for a while for not being "notable" enough:
https://deletionpedia.org/en/Nim_(programming_language)
Meanwhile Wikipedia's own policies are violated with the comprehensive detailed list of Pokemon and sub-articles that really belongs on a dedicated wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon
Most programming languages start out non-notable. I've built 3 of them. None of them belong in the encyclopedia!
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I agree, there are a ridiculous number of vanity pages on Wikipedia and quite frankly, grossly inconsistent enforcement. Wikipedia is being used as a tool for building a personal profile and achieve SEO goals around Google searches for particular people's name.
My particular pet peeve are the surprising number of bios of wealthy people who have done absolutely nothing remarkable or noteworthy other than be exceptionally successful at marketing themselves, which allows them to get their name pop up in the occasional mainstream media article. Of course those mentions are just churnalism in a puff section of the newspaper, cobbled together from quotes ripped out of a press release. But apparently that's enough to satisfy "notability". And of course these articles are almost always predominantly maintained by single purpose accounts; most likely sock puppets of the person in question.
Shame they don't seem to have a copy of the Bear versus Lion article. Wikipedia still has Tiger versus Lion and articles for Bear-baiting and Lion-baiting, but the Bear versus Lion article seems to be lost. Archive.org doesn't even have it. I'm quite sure it once existed though.
Thus site really helps to establish one's position on deleteionist vs inclusioninst debate.
Internet arguments often choose the example of deleted articles to illustrate their point, so one cannot get overall "feel" of the quality of delete pages. But hitting "Random Page" link on that website shows a nice, unbiased random sample.
Thank you. There is almost 100,000 deleted articles. I don't get why they would do this to so many topics.
"I don't get why they would do this to so many topics."
Self-promotion and non-notable content.
Pretty early in Wikipedia's existence all sorts of spammers and non-entities realized that they could use Wikipedia as their personal advertising billboard.
Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too. For example, you could, arguably, have an article about every one of the 7 billion people on the planet and about what foods each of them like, etc.
Inclusionists might like all such articles to be included, but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted.
Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too.
Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia though, not in any traditional sense. Just because they use that word in the byline doesn't mean that it makes sense to pretend that Wikipedia is a 1980's door-to-door-salesperson bound edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. And in the same sense, it makes no sense to try and apply the same standards and policies from an outdated legacy media format to an entirely new media format.
but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted.
The problem with this mind-set is the idea that there is some objective, universally applicable idea of what it means to be "non notable". There isn't.
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Google Knol pretty much let anyone write their own article on anything. It was not a success.
Looking at some deleted articles [1], I do get it. There seem to be hundreds of articles of asteroids which consist of only a few sentences. A lot of small or already defunct startup companies, small indie-bands and their albums etc.
[1] https://deletionpedia.org/en/Special:AllPages
Yep, exactly. For the curious, and without casting aspersions on the individual (be nice!), here is an example of a non-notable page created for self-promotion: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Damith_Madhusanka...
It's currently up for speedy deletion, and will probably be removed soon.
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Eh, I think that paring down excess content is important for just about any organizational effort.
I'm not convinced that most of this content was worth including on Wikipedia, but hey, if these people want to host it they should go for it.
Why? It’s not like a printed encyclopedia; there really aren’t space limitations in any meaningful way.
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Take a look through what is deleted, it's mostly junk. In my experience Wikipedia could stand to be more aggressive with its pruning. Low quality articles waste your time because you have to read them for a bit before you realize it is worthless.
It's worth noting that Wikidata has far more inclusive standards than any Wikipedia, though it still excludes true vanity submissions. Many of these deleted items could get a Wikidata entry if they don't have one already.
The only times I've felt frustration looking up things and finding them deleted was like some minor god from mythology of which there likely wasn't much written as there isn't much known anywhere TBH
Quite a few were not actually deleted; not sure how to tally those that were.
>I don't get why they would do this to so many topics.
It's a form of censorship, hence a form of thought control.
It's mostly a form of spam-control.
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It’s crazy how people feel entitled to have somebody else host their “thoughts” on the Internet.
As the project at hand shows, if Wikipedia doesn’t want to host your page, you can simply publish elsewhere.
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Sure, in the sense that literally any text is thought control.
Having started to occasionally edit stuff on Wikipedia over the pandemic, I have a newfound understanding of the reasons for deleting stuff.
As a casual user, you will, by definition, tend to see the most-trafficked, well-maintained pages. Deleted pages, as a general rule, are not those. Your impression of the level of quality that can be achieved is completely off. This is also true if you read a lot in some specialized subject that has a small, but active and productive community (some pop culture fandoms, for example).
Leave the beaten paths at your own risk, especially if it concerns anything that has small communities with differences of opinion. Like foreign wars.
Example: this page about some soldier in the Balkan wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Milan_Tepić&oldid...
This isn't the worst I've seen, but something I remembered because I tried to clean it up recently. It includes a long discussion that has little to do with the subject, is obviously the product of a tug-of-war between opposing POVs and fails to present the subject in a way that would allow the reader to come to any conclusion. Or, at least, I still have no idea if this guy is a war criminal, hero, or both.
And this is the stuff that doesn't get deleted.
The other standard is obviously self-serving content, i. e. articles written by the subject or the subject's employees/PR people etc. There is simply no way to deal with the fundamental problem that an article's subject always has far more interest in an article than any random editor without limiting the scope to subjects that attract at least a few interested editors without a conflict of interest.
> that an article's subject
or the subject's enemies...
There are a tremendous amount of defamatory hit pieces that show up too. I wonder in a S230 analysis if deletionpedia itself is the publisher of this material: after all, it wasn't the original author that went and dug it up and published it on their site. I hope they've received good legal advice.
My first taste of Wikipedia’s controversial policies was on an entry for the song “Regulate” by rapper Warren G. Someone posted a synopsis of the lyrics which various Wikipedia editors found “clinical to the point of parody” (paraphrasing) and thus worthy of reversion. I have never been able to look at Wikipedia the same since.
This is a famous case. I can almost understand why they got rid of the extended synopsis. For anyone who wants to read it, here's a copy on Reddit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/4z3u55/wikipedias_ex...
This is hilarious, haha. There are people who wanted to keep this?
What's wrong with reverting content that isn't relevant for the encyclopedic format of Wikipedia? A decent example of this might be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempted_(Squeeze_song)#Backg..., which goes into the background of the song without analyzing every lyric. Save that for Genius.
The worst part of Wikipedia is the arcane rules and procedures.
Wikipedia tries to keep things consistent, but this has created a whole body of “case law” that only experts know.
I once described a law that had been proposed, but not passed, and had my contribution removed because it was “legal advice.”
I couldn’t even wrap my head around that one.
I remember when a historian who wanted to correct common misceptions in articles would have his updates reverted. The common views are not always correct. Such as Canada didn't have troops in Vietnam. Canada had MASH medical units, and theres even a canadian webpage listing medals award and names who served in Vietnam.
He finally kept his updates on his personal page, but then wikipedia made it you couldnt find his page.
Then I started finding that was the common idea on Wikipedia, deleting views from wikipedia that didnt meet the popular editors. Pages got deleted with rules that didnt make sense, not popular enough, not reported by main stream news, no articles found, etc.
I'm old enough to remember news and events that counter the popular views, and those events are not even in historical news articles. The re-writing of history has been going on in wikipedia launched, its more common than you think.
My favorite wikpedia fake excuse, they dont have enough space to include non-popular historical events, its history, authors who trended all the talk shows even oprah and made nytimes best seller, etc, are removed from history.
Theres entire mainstream history in 80's that don't match reality, and was deleted. The narrative of groups in charge, are the ones who get reported.
Those who control the history books they say.
> I'm old enough to remember news and events that counter the popular views, and those events are not even in historical news articles.
I would be genuinely fascinated to learn some examples of this.
This is something I've been suspecting for a long time, but I can rarely put my finger on anything specific.
But I'm sure we're all being collectively gaslit.
Lots of things feel disconcerting these days, like reality is being erased and shifted.
> The common views are not always correct.
This is undoubtedly so, but the point of wikipedia is to record the common view. The criterion for inclusion is acceptance in the mainstream sources, not truth.
> a historian who wanted to correct common misceptions in articles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors
The rest of your comment is extremely vague, and gives no links to back anything up.
So? I commented on deleted entries 20+ years ago I saw, about a new site that shows deleted entries.
Even the historical comments are deleted, why would they want to ban the debates.
Yeah, no agenda anywhere. /s
Pages are technically technical debt. I understand why unpopular topics are not maintained. I've not seen anything that would suggest something systematic (especially cross language).
Can you elaborate about the active effort you suspect exists? (Rewriting implies authorship)
> Canada had MASH medical units
Are you sure you're not talking about Red Cross teams from Canada (not exactly Canadian troops).
> and theres even a canadian webpage listing medals award and names who served in Vietnam.
Aren't you talking about Canadian recipients of US medals (because they joined the US military)?
There were also those involved with the ICCS during the US withdrawal, various defense companies who sent contractors to work on equipment in Vietnam for their US customers, etc.
No, this was 20+ years ago, he had links and to canadian military websites. It wasnt the canadians who joined the US military or Red Cross.
If only his page still existed.
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The Wikipedia article for Michael Aquino would be a great one to see added here. Lt Colonel in the US Army who wrote a seminal paper on psychological operations, had close ties to the highest levels of NATO command in Europe, performed a ritual with an SS dagger at Wewelsburg Castle in Germany, and was an outspoken Satanist who was credibly accused of child abuse in the Presidio daycare scandal. One can see why a lot of people might not mind that his page was deleted and now redirects to "Temple of Set."
> credibly accused of child abuse in the Presidio daycare scandal
Man, I thought everything to do with the Satanic Panic was memory holed.
Damn, I'm surprised they deleted his page. He was a real nutjob, but a notable nutjob. I have a pdf of one of his books about psyops archived somewhere.
Would be interesting if there was an easy way to find “controversial” pages. If a page has a significant amount of edits or discussions prior to deletion for example.
More and more it feels like the death of Wikipedia is coming and maybe that's a good thing, thus making space for the next "Wikipedia" that could improve on many shortcomings of the current implementation.
It happens so often on the internet that people who lack competency to be a just moderator, end up being moderators and then abusing the power that was entrusted to them, without any consequences...
It's just sad...
It's nice to have once again a authoritative link to this page [1]. A shame that wikipedia think this is irrelevant information.
https://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_PlayStation_2_games_wit...
An analogue project for the German Wikipedia is Marjorie Wiki (https://marjorie-wiki.de/wiki/MARJORIE-WIKI). Do similar projects exist for other languages?
Personally I don’t understand this “notability” deletion process. It’s text, even the most unremarkable article weighs less than ephemeral logs.
Additive metadata is more than as effective for filtering and boosting what’s relevant.
It’s a really asinine policy, I’m glad this project exists
As a teenager ~18 years ago, I joined ADW (Association of Deletionist Wikipedians) and I was very proud of myself. We took down a lot of personal vanity pages, per the Wikipedia is An Encyclopedia policy (at odds with the Wikipedia is Not Paper policy). I also led the push to get a lot of pokemon pages deleted as not notable. I'm not sure how I feel about all that now. Deleting the vanity pages that people put up about themselves probably improved the platform, but the pokemon were harmless.
I've noticed that one article which was marked for deletion on Wikipedia is marked as "hooray survived deletionism" on deletionpedia, but only got changed to a redirect after a lot of data was deleted.
https://deletionpedia.org/en/Jeopardy!_College_Championship
For more on Wikipedia's slow transformation from a culture of inclusionism to one of deletionism, see Gwern's fantastic "In Defense of Inclusionism" here: https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism
There is not point currently in trying to fix an error when you read an article in Wikipedia. In the 99% of the cases is reverted automatically when you quit the page to keep the wrong statement. The momentum when it was cool to help there has passed.
Unfortunately deletionpedia only grabs pages that are previously marked on Wikipedia in some way. The disappearing tech-related articles I've been looking for (smaller programming languages, "Quote notation") can't be found there.
Whatever happened to the critics who ran a protest site called Wikitruth? Did it go offline? Was there some controversy? I'd check their Wikipedia page but they really don't have one.
Deleted articles aren't THAT big an issue, since most articles that get deleted are crap (there are exceptions). Maybe more important is idiots reverting good edits or otherwise removing info from articles, without the articles themselves getting deleted. The info is thus retained in the edit history, but it's harder to programatically recover, because: the context changes in later editing; it's hard to distinguish information removal from ordinary editing/rewriting; there are tons of automated edits that are just plain noise with no clear way to distinguish them from human edits, etc. I've been wanting to spend some time on this some day.
Any relation to this other Deletionpedia? http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/
Are all deleted articles weighed equally? If a bio page is deleted because it's self-promoting does it still appear regardless?
Would be weird if they didn't include those pages on a "radical inclusionist" wiki.
What are some examples of really great deleted articles that we now have the opportunity to read thanks to this site?
Seems like this site is dead as of Sept 2020. Or maybe the auto-publishing bot is under a different name now?
Hence why it's nice to have your own copies of things. They won't get altered or disappeared.
I'd like something similar for flagged articles and comments here on HN.
Hell yeah man!
Wikipedia deleted the entry for a company called Rosemont Seneca Partners which was the financial firm of the younger son of Joe Biden, i.e. Hunter Biden.
The stated reasoning behind the deletion was that it is not a notable company.
This company is discussed extensively in the emails recovered from the laptop of Hunter Biden. News of these emails was censored by Twitter and Facebook just before the 2020 election. It is widely believed by millions (including the new owner of Twitter) that this was a partisan move. Jack Dorsey has remarked that this was a mistake that he rectified as soon as he came to learn of it, which was several weeks after the censorship.
At the time of the news story, Facebook announced that they were "reducing the spread" of this story. The move was announced by Andy Stone, who is and was the erstwhile head of communications at Meta, and also by total coincidence, was previously a staff member for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, and "House Majority PAC", a political action group whose stated mission is to ensure the majority of the Democratic Party in the US House of Representatives.
One of the people in the emails was Tony Bobulinski - a former US Navy Seal Lieutenant. He clarified the context in one of the emails which referenced a "10%" cut for the "big guy". This was a reference to current President Joe Biden, per Bobulinski.
Over a year after the election, the Washington Post confirmed the authenticity of the emails from the laptop. Facebook's aforementioned Andy Stone announced at the time that stories about the contents of the email were "eligible for checking by third party fact-checkers" and that the spread of the story would be reduced until they returned a verdict. Stone has announced no verdict thus far.
Many are quick to point to the Streisand effect when discussing this topic, which while relevant, does not address the apparent coordinated nature of the censorship behind this story, wherein the same incorrect conclusion was drawn by multiple parties on the basis of no evidence.
This is the type of thing we see happening in third world countries quite often, where the government and the ruling party have an iron grip over the media. Just this week we have seen governments cut off internet access entirely as an effort to curb the spread of disinformation. To see first world countries engaging in similar behavior leaves one with little hope for the future of democratic rule.
Recently it was Israel's Independence Day. I was looking for something about Israel's War of Independence and I saw these Wikipedia articles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_Wa... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_... . Imagine if the article on the American Revolutionary War was renames to the First British American War. I've come to simply expect that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for anything somewhat political.
A quick search for "1948 Arab Israeli War" shows several links from US and pro-Israel sources using the term, which seems to be a relatively neutral way to refer to it:
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-... https://israeled.org/the-arab-israeli-war-of-1948-a-short-hi...
While the term British-American War is not in active use, I don't think either side would have any problem with it. It's not like there is any secret the Americans were fighting against the British.
My favorite example of this is when Apple renamed Mac OS X to "macOS", someone went around and retroactively renamed nearly every mention of "OS X" on Wikipedia to "macOS" even in situations where it makes absolutely no sense, as "macOS" did not exist during the topic/time period which the article references.
English Wikipedia is written from PoV of English sources (and therefore English-speaking countries). It should use a name that is most common in those countries.
No offense, as long as the titles match what is used in English media (for English wikipedia) and even lists other common names in the lede, then that's fine. Also redirect from other known names. Being offended by lack of content is one thing, being offended by a different title than you expect is a bit much.