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Comment by kvetching

4 years ago

Thank you. There is almost 100,000 deleted articles. I don't get why they would do this to so many topics.

30 comments

kvetching

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pmoriarty  4 years ago

"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.

  • mindcrime  4 years ago

    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 And in the same sense, it makes no sense to try and apply the same standards and policies from an outdated legacy media format to an entirely new media format.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.

    • tptacek  4 years ago

      Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and the fact that you think it could or should be something else doesn't change that.

      Wikipedia doesn't claim that there is a universal objective definition for "notability". "Notability" is a term of art on Wikipedia. You can't win this argument with a dictionary.

      There may be nothing in the world a true Wikipedian would rather do than explain the project's definition of a word like "Notability", at ponderous, relentless, unceasing length. So ignorance is no excuse! There's more documentation for this concept than there is for Postgres. RTFM, friend.

      If you don't like Wikipedia's rules or think it could be something more, you are welcome to fork it.

      1 reply →

  • ghaff  4 years ago

    Google Knol pretty much let anyone write their own article on anything. It was not a success.

V__  4 years ago

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

warning26  4 years ago

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.

  • gumby  4 years ago

    Why? It’s not like a printed encyclopedia; there really aren’t space limitations in any meaningful way.

    • notahacker  4 years ago

      There really are limitations to the amount of time the core editors and administration have to devote to it though. Even if they could keep on top of the blatant spamming and self promotion and nutty theories and articles created purely to harass, if you have an order of magnitude more pages you have an order of magnitude more pages that can get out of date, be vandalised, be total bullshit etc.

    • pvg  4 years ago

      Because a digital encyclopedia is still an encyclopedia rather than an archive of everything (which is a different and useful thing as well and also happens to exist in various forms).

    • macintux  4 years ago

      Too much noise often makes it hard to find the signal. It's also difficult to sustain any quality/accuracy, especially if the topics are too obscure.

    • ghaff  4 years ago

      This is like a discussion the other day on streaming service quality. Even if the "crap" isn't completely without value to anyone, dump 100,000 low quality/value pieces of content into anything and it's that much harder to find (and trust) the good content.

    • zamadatix  4 years ago

      Apart from too much noise a lot of it is duplicated effort as well. E.g. Cherry RC is indeed deleted but so it can be a redirect to RC Cola which already talks about it. Letting those exists just serves to dilute the quality of the articles on the topic even though the overall article count is higher.

greenthrow  4 years ago

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.

zozbot234  4 years ago

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.

michaelbrave  4 years ago

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

Jerry2  4 years ago

>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.