Comment by donatj
4 years ago
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.
> Something is ‘notable’ according not to subjective perception but rather whether you can find third party sources to corroborate basic details.
Don't confuse notability and verifiability. Notability requires verifiable evidence, but also that the topic has received "significant coverage" that addresses the topic directly and in detail. (Lots of things are verifiable but trivial.) There are specific, detailed notability policies for everything from academics to music to astronomical objects, and even which individual numbers are notable.
For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_notability_...
> The basic problem is that Wikipedia is a democracy
No, that is not the basic problem with Wikipedia. Had it been a democracy there would have been ways for Wikipedia readers and writers to influence what Wikipedia editors do. The 'talk' page gives the illusion of allowing such influence but in reality the decisions are made by an in-group which is mostly ideologically homogeneous. This in-group is not the same for all areas of interest but it is stable within interest areas.
Wikipedia is not a democracy, it is a collection of oligarchies - small fiefdoms united under an umbrella organisation which give them the semblance of being democratic. This problem is inherent in the way Wikipedia is organised, there is no neutral arbiter to appeal to when confronted with an ideologically homogeneous and censorious group of editors. The (only?) way out of this conundrum is the same as that for free software projects, namely to fork the project in the hope of creating a better version. While forking the content is easy - there are regular dumps which can be used for this purpose - it is another thing to actually host a successful fork. The Wikimedia foundation is sitting on a pile of donations and can afford the significant resources which go into hosting one of the most popular sites on the 'net. A fork could be hosted on IPFS or in some other way utilise peer-to-peer strategies to offload the burden of hosting popular content in a similar fashion to the way Peertube solves this problem. As far as I'm concerned the ultimate goal of any fork should be to eventually re-join the original project when the 'unbiased' version has shown to be the more popular one. While I do not doubt that an unbiased Wikipedia would be more popular than the current version it is questionable as to whether the Wikimedia foundation would agree on allowing such a re-merger to occur - time will tell.
Mergers like you mention have happened early on, and they worked.
Last I looked the decisions were not per-se arrived at by an in-group ("The Cabal"). Instead, a lot of it functions by applying smart-mob behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_mob
Note that -at times (and/or at particularly small scales)- it can be really hard to distinguish a smart mob from a cabal, so I can see where the impression comes from.
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> Wikipedia is not a democracy, it is a collection of oligarchies - small fiefdoms united under an umbrella organisation which give them the semblance of being democratic.
The argument could be made, that any human grouping/organization of sufficiently large size ceases to be a democracy and devolves into what you describe.
And in my own experience the tipping point is in the hundreds of individuals, not thousands or millions.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...
Wikipedia is not a democracy, or at least it isn't supposed to be. Democracies can do things like decide that pi=3[citation needed]. Some bits look superficially like democratic procedures though. This can catch people by surprise and the outcome of diverse processes can be different to what one might expect.
I do agree with CDrost that some politics is involved. I also traditionally did not agree with the way "Notability" has grown. Originally IIRC it was an eventualist criterion to rescue articles without sources (or bad sources) from deletion... because if things are (obviously) notable, one will definitely be able to find sources eventually.
Now somehow the way notability works has been inverted, even allowing deletion of sourced articles.
There is a parable here about processes getting misread/worn down over time, but I don't quite have all the bits together to write it out in full.
Finally note that most wikipedia processes can be initiated by non-admins, and often are.
That actually doesn't sound objective at all.
You can write a press release about anything and pay a distribution company like $100-400 to get it distributed to hundreds of sites.
You can also pay just $50+ to have a "guest post" on a third party site. Some will not even disclose it's a guest post but either way you can realistically use any name you want regardless.
You could even create your own "third party" site and just post the "objective" info there that is used as a source.
So I guess it is objective but that it can be gamed so easily that it is turned subjective
You can also just pay to have your article included on Wikipedia. I know someone in Hollywood who is very not notable who has an article written about him. He paid a top-level editor to write it to make sure it got through all the bullshit and didn't get deleted. It even states on the editor's page that he was paid to write the article.
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“Wikipedia is a democracy”
i’m going to need a reliable source for that. meaning: it can only be true if a multi billion dollar corporation says that it’s true
> “Wikipedia is a democracy”
Given that the majority is not an expert on any particular topic, I suppose that is not a good thing, so I would be surprised if it were true.
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...
I did this for about 4 months for my own field (information security) and I was astonished by how much energy people would put in to keeping their vanity pages. There was a whole cluster of articles about a non-notable IT security person, their podcast, and their "hacking group", membership in which extended notability to all sorts of other random people. Somebody in the clique was friends with a particularly aggressive admin, which made it especially difficult to roll any of it back.
The German Wikipedia article on random/urandom still claims that entropy depletes and using urandom may allow an attacker to "calculate" the random numbers after the fact (whatever that means).
Several people tried to correct it, but since the article author considers the article "his", all discussion attempts were shut down (with gems like "the random number subsystem was programmed by T'so, so it doesn't matter what Torvalds says about the subject"), and all edit attempts were reverted as "vandalism".
This article will claim urandom to be insecure until eternity.
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I’m sure there’s a whole marketplace around “thought leader” promotion on Wikipedia.
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.
Thank you! This is literally the most helpful thing I’ve ever read on Hacker News!
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.
I liked Metallica better before the Black album and think they're kind of a caricature of themselves now, but to each their own.