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Comment by VLM

4 years ago

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.

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VLM

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robonerd  4 years ago

> 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.

ghaff  4 years ago

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.