Comment by mindcrime
4 years ago
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.
Here's an example: https://deletionpedia.org/en/VList
Ten years ago pjscott mentioned "Phil Bagwell's VList" here: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/VList
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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
Interestingly, this article doesn't seem to be on Deletionpedia: https://deletionpedia.org/en/David_R._Hawkins, https://deletionpedia.org/w/index.php?search=David+R.+Hawkin...
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https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/political-deletionism-at-w...
The author of this article wants me to believe wikipedia has been taken over by the "super woke" but frankly they just come across as having an unhealthy obsession with IQ as a heritable trait and desperately want to use this to tie race to IQ.
They describe themselves as a "contrarian scientist". At the end the author complains that their wikipedia page has been deleted twice, my heart bleeds.
I've read through the section of this article which discusses the "Jewish Intelligence" page, and find the reasoning behind why we should be mad about the deletion to be extraordinarily weak compared to the explanation given by the editor (the editor that is then ad hominem attacked by the author of the article).
Do you really expect anyone to believe this?
Every topic referenced there is related to racial superiority, at least from a quick skim. I can see why Wikipedia might be gunshy on that front.
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Wow, in one of the cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Article...), they actually deleted the page entirely, then re-created it, so that any prior edit history was lost. Talk about deceptive.
Good thing no-one printed the page out, or we might have to hear one of those "Where they have burned books, they will end up burning people" lectures. But this is "on a computer", so entirely different.
In general, it’s a bad idea to bring up an unrelated controversy as an example when you’re trying to argue for anything, because you’re going to lose a good chunk of your audience who might otherwise be open to your point of view.
FYI: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard
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.
Most people are pro-censorship. What people generally disagree on is what should be censored. Some find nudity offensive, for others it’s ideas.
This is always been the case. Eg TV networks have guidelines on what they can and cannot air.
If anything, the internet brought about an unprecedented lack of censorship. But that was only when it was a smaller community of individuals. The moment it snowballed, moderation was needed (whether that was on IRC, BBS or wherever).
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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.