Comment by crdrost
4 years ago
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.
The 'smart mob' - which is a bit of an odd name when applied to actions centred on a digital platform - can be a way for an in-group to form. Once that in-group has seized control over an interest area they'll (ab)use their power to keep out any further take-over attempts. As long as they are ideologically aligned with the majority of editors they're mostly free to police 'their' interest areas which unfortunately makes this a self-reinforcing structure.
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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.
Any human grouping/organization of sufficiently large size does not start out as a democracy, this is not the natural organisation form for our species. Traditionally groups are hierarchical with a 'strong' leader who leads in times of strife, often combined with a small group of 'wise' men/women who make more strategic/long-term decisions. The idea of democracy is relatively new, originating in the city-state of Athens some 500 years BC. This Athenian democracy was not a full democracy since only citizens had a voice. While that sounds good it should be noted that women, slaves, foreigners and youths below the age of military service were not eligible for citizenship and as such did not have a voice.
A true democracy is hard to achieve at larger scale but modern technology could maybe possibly eventually - yes, there is that much uncertainty - be used to attain it. Then again, even in a true democracy the individual vote can still be controlled by manipulating the voter towards whatever ideological goals desired by the individual or group in control of the information which reaches those voters.
Wikipedia could allow a more democratic form of content moderation by allowing readers to 'score' editorial decisions, a bit like e.g. the Slashdot meta-moderation system works. This would at least make it possible to weed out activist (groups of) editors who use their 'power' to turn the encyclopedia into their propaganda platform.
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The only true democracy is just everyone deciding to ignore you. Everything else is just window dressing on some form of authority.
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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.
Oh yeah that too.
And you can also pay people to insert links in Wikipedia articles too (which have debatable SEO benefits)
“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.