Comment by andrewljohnson
4 years ago
These are mostly vanity pages for people. Now if I add myself to wikipedia, it will at least end up somewhere!
4 years ago
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?
If someone were literally being paid to push an agenda online as a day job, they would want to eliminate all organic desire to produce content leaving only the somewhat more influential paid content.
Just because site X is not paying for user generated content, does not mean no people are being paid to generate content on site X.
Always follow the money.
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What the Inclusionists seem to miss is the fact that an encyclopedia isn't The Hitchhiker's Guide or Angelfire, and that every page on the site incurs ongoing volunteer time to patrol for vandalism and corrections. Also, the idea that maybe it's OK if everyone doesn't edit Wikipedia pages; maybe some people should write secondary sources rather than tertiary ones.
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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!
Do you really think that the subject of a Wikipedia article should decide whether they are notable or not? Seems a bit hypocritical given your deletionist stance.
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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.