The Wikipedia deletion game

Heh, I wikilinked that in the debate article with a “this guy should have his own page” in the edit summary.
Anyway, I think people want to delete some articles because articles which are crap or on non notable subjects get made all the time (I don’t think that’s the case here). Sometimes an article gets made that is really one big advertisement for someone’s business, book, etc. – basically using Wiki for free advertising. Folks who are really into the Wiki thing feel, with some justification, that this reflects badly on the project as a whole – and of course Wiki has been criticized for stuff like that in the past. So there’s some boundary gaurdin’. Of course this being Wiki it often gets way out line and reaches levels of inanity that only Wiki can.

Not only that, they actually deleted the glorious List of Homophonous Phrases!. This is a big issue on Wikipedia known as “deletionism”, Benjamin Mako Hill has written and done some interesting stuff on it. Fortunately we still have Deletionpedia.

I think that’s it’s part of the general trend to make Wikipedia closer to a genuine resource rather than a great sump of fandom and fandom-related trivia. At one time, after all, the Wikipedia entry on Alexander Nevsky noted that Saavik refers to him in a Star Trek novel and the entry on Iranian Air Flight 655 noted that a Star Trek: Deep Space 9 episode was based on the incident. Both of these references are now gone from their respective entries, and the result is that both are no longer examples of why Wikipedia is so amusingly fannish.

Up with Wikipedia deletions!

A couple threads converge here. The main one is the “Biographies of living people” issue which grew out of the Siegenthaler incident where someone added information to the John Seigenthaler, Sr article blaming him for the Kennedy assassinations…and the information remained unnoticed for several months. BLPs, as they are called, are a major source of paranoia, but the policy is also a useful stick to hit your opponents over the head with, and a useful tool for sanitising articles.

The secondary issue is notability…a fundamental question of what constitutes an encyclopaedic topic. There’s a “deletionist”/“inclusionist” culture war in Wikipedia.

These two strains come together in the issue of people who are notable for just a single issue – sort of like Joe the Plummer. He really isn’t notable outside of the context of the debate, so coverage should be in the article about the debate or the campaign. At least at this stage of the game. (Email me if I can help you more on the issue of Wikipedia culture.)

I think the simple answer is that those who get utility for enforcing social norms (who are useful enough that we reward them enough to keep them around) aren’t known for being very good at being discriminating as to which social norms to follow. It’s a package of traits that don’t separate easily. The people who are willing to put work into things like wikipedia are also the people who are likely to take things like wikipedia’s notability standard very seriously. Likewise, our altruistic punishers are also our obnoxious busybodies… evolution is a local mazimizer. :-)

Notability is a requirement for being the subject of an entry but a disqualification for being the author of one.

I keed, I keed.

Read:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131

And Zora, why on Earth should there not be a page for every hadith as well as a page for every word in every hadith? Viva La biblioteca de Babel!

Kieran, your blog colleague John Quiggin (who, as it happens, was the one to start Ezster’s article) might take issue with your flippery.

This link might be a useful addition to this thread.

It isn’t just deletionism, there is a fair bit of ideological axe grinding. At one point there was a wikipedia entry for each prisoner at Gitmo. It was then argued that these people are common criminals, undeserving of notoriety. I attempted to argue that the administration said these were the worst of the worst, as bad as Bonny & Clyde or Al Capone, and therefore notable. Sadly, I have a life and couldn’t stay and argue as long as the other side could.

But the vast majority of us ordinary Wiki users never glance at a discussion page, so the internal dynamics are irrelevant.

Yes. I tend to look up fairly mundane apolitical things and fix what I can without paying any attention at all to the discussion page. My browser history reveals a band, a figure of speech, a phrase, a political leader (looked for the spelling of his name in the original language), a kind of alien (for use in a joke), and Skeletor, which I look up every time there’s an argument about Wikipedia.

Hmm. I am a very shallow person.

if the deletion goes through then there will be no entry, period, so it’s not an issue of what might have gone on behind the scenes about it since there will no longer be a there there.

Right. But how does that affect the usefulness of Wikipedia?

I’m really not trying to be rude here. As far as I’m concerned, you should have an entry. But obviously, even if Wikipedia ends up not including an entry for Ezster Hargittai, its coverage is still far broader than any traditional reference work. And as long as Wikipedia has any standards of relevance at all, there are going to be edge cases where people disagree. So if the line for inclusion ends up getting drawn so you fall on the wrong side of it, so what? I mean, I don’t have an entry either.

I just don’t see what this example proves.

… sorry, I should have said Joe the Plumber. Your entry wasn’t actually the subject of the post.

Re: 21
For the most part I agree with Eszter, which is why I think Mohgborr (and he’s about as non-notable as it gets. He’s non-notable within a non-notable category of a non-notable topic) should have his page, dang it.

The main problem is with 1) essentially commercial (though sometimes political) advertising – in which case the authority of the encyclopedia is being used to convince readers that some obscure product or political movement or whatever is “new and improved” or something like that, in turn undermining the very authority of the encyclopedia it is relying on. And 2) you’d be surprised at how skillful some people are at pushing a particular POV (which is what you’re supposed to avoid) just by creating articles. You make an article on Joe Schmoe. You say Joe Schmoe wrote that “cats are better than dogs”. You make it a big article making it seem like Joe Schmoe is really important. Then you create twenty other articles on other Joe Schmoe’s, each of whom thinks “cats are better than dogs” and pretty soon you’ve created an impression that most people think “cats are better than dogs” and the encyclopedia says so!
Of course other editors could go through all the Joe Schmoe articles, de-POV’em, note that Joe Schmoe is just a guy that nobody heard of etc. but that’s a lot of work. Deleting the articles on Joe Schmoes is just a short cut here.

Note Moghborr!

Who wants to work on an encyclopedia that’s full of fifty million shitty entries?

Many many many people less Walt. How many people want to live in X town or at Y business?

I don’t understand why there isn’t room for a billion entries.

The attempts to ration Wiki attention stem from the scarcity theory of value. The fewer contenders for public attention, the more is available for the worthy few. Like greed, this is a reflexive and irrational behavior.

You might ask the same question about DRM copy protection. Everyone knows it doesn’t work, but IP owners clamor for it, no matter how much it hurts their sales. It is a reflexive clutching at an instinctively appealing proposition (protecting your property).

The logical space of the public Internet is characterized by abundance, yet it is the target of perverse attempts to generate scarcity. To paraphrase Rousseau, The Internet was born free, but everywhere people try to put it in chains. In other words, human behaviors exhibit inertia that perpetuates them in new contexts where they are no longer appropriate.

Let a trillion Wiki pages bloom.

True Zora, if we have an entry for every hadith on the internet, we might run out of space. I mean, why would anybody care about the founding documents of one of the world’s largest religions? I hope no one gets the idea to record information about Zoroastrian, Inuit, or strip-mall Pentecostal religious texts, which would likewise detract from the other entries.

Also, Walt, it is probably depressing to be an editor of “shitty” entries, which is why a lot of us think the deletionist clique should just stop editing them, and let them be.

Eszter, it’s at least in part because Wikipedia has a perimeter defense problem. The general case of Wikipedia’s effectiveness is that it is energetically simpler to defend than attack, but this breaks down with marginal cases. When there are articles that only a small number of people care about, defending those articles against mischief because Wikipedia’s general resource for solving any problem — massive over-provisioning of human attention — doesn’t work.

Now I’m generally on the side of the Inclusionists, but the in ability to defend weakly subscribed articles seems to me to be a non-crazy, non-bitter reason to propose Deletionism.

38 and 41 make the case for deletions rather well.

Not to add anything remotely useful to the discussion, but Nicholson Baker had a nifty essay about this in the New York Review of Books.

it’s hardly the experts who make the decisions … some of the most knowledgeable experts will stay away from contributing to Wikipedia precisely because their time is too valuable to then have their work simply deleted (and they don’t have time to stick around to fight the fight).

I guess that’s what it comes down too, isn’t it — the problem with Wikipedia is that the experts have to participate on the same terms as the mob. But if no one can point to anyything wrong with the articles themselves, maybe the conclusion is that that isn’t such a problem, after all.

Brianna Laugher has a short but interesting discussion of this in the light of Wikipedia’s history and philosophy:

My theory is that in the very early days, maybe pre-2004 (which I didn’t personally participate in), no one much was paying attention to Wikipedia. It didn’t matter if someone created an article you had a problem with because chances are you wouldn’t even know about it. Just getting a Wikipedia article in a top 10 search result was a cause for celebration.

By the end of 2005, we had lived through Seigenthaler. This incident especially threw a lot of scrutiny on Wikipedians, who previously had been just happy geeking out and amusing themselves. Seigenthaler was the mainstream media and traditional authorities (academics) demanding to know what the hell Wikipedia thought it was doing and how dare they and just exactly how were they planning to meet the standards of those traditional fonts of knowledge anyway?

48-

I’m so confused. Isn’t the case you describe an example of Wikipedia working exactly as one would want it to?

Shorter Wikipedia Busybodies: We must especially keep a vigilant eye out for those topics that are the most insignificant.

I wasn’t aware of Deletionpedia that Timon mentioned above. Looks like a helpful site. Presumably one could find all sorts of examples there, but perspectives will obviously differ.

Well, why don’t you take a look at it? I just did — flipped through 20 or so random entries. They all fell into three categories: unsourced bios, presumably put up by the person him/herself (“Kristian Montano is a well-known, extremely athletic, intelligent, and good-looking individual. He is currently in his second year of studies at McGill University, wear he majors in Anatomy and Cell Biology.”), promotional squibs about bands, churches, etc. (i.e. spam), or long peices about obscure corners of the fantasy gaming world (like Moghborr). They all struck me as entirely appropriate for deletion.

Is it really too much to ask that someone who thinks Wikipedia’s deletion policy is a problem, come up with one example of a genuinely useful article that was deleted?

I appreciate the need for *some* deletion, but to me in a high-functioning Wikipedia this is done with a massive bias towards retention. In part this is because to me one of the most powerful features of Wikipedia is precisely that “fannish” non-filtered aspect, which is one of the reasons it is (and will be in the future) a great resource. For instance I hated the pre-Internet days when it was quite difficult to access things like copies of things like The Realist or early copies of Rolling Stone compared to say Time, the NYT etc. It is precisely the ephemera that is the lure. For instance, the “Joe the Plumber” entry will invariably suck right now (as do amost alll entries on actively controversial/adversial issues) but in the long run he probably deserves a short little factual entry which can quickly inform folks chasing a reference 10,20,30+ years hence.

The other more pernicious issue that comes up is the vindictive advocates of deletion. For instance as happened with Steve Gilliard. I checked and was glad to see that he
still had an article.

Feeling like a true editor and not erasing someone else’s stuff once in a while are two contradictory things.

Eszter,

For the most part, I’m also of the view (shared by most Wikipedia outsiders, and many insiders like me) that deletionism on Wikipedia goes overboard. Some of my favorite articles, like “List of snowclones” and most of the formerly much larger and wilder “List of people known as father or mother of something”, have fallen beneath the bar for Wikipedia inclusion.

But the credible threat of deletion is also one of the most powerful means of enforcing Wikipedia’s content policies and improving the quality of the articles that do survive. Articles that lack sources and don’t demonstrate “notability” also generally lack context, such that the article gives the reader no way to learn more than what the entry says or understand its (in)significance. A deletion discussion often prompts authors to improve their articles in an effort to save them.

Deleting such content that doesn’t improve is also a way to keep up the standards of the remaining content that serves as the template for new content: new contributors model their work on existing related articles, and in the past large sectors of Wikipedia on the intellectual periphery grew into low-quality mazes of content that have since been replaced by smaller numbers of much-better-contextualized articles that are more useful to those unfamiliar with the topics. Coverage of Pokemon is a good example: there used to be separate articles for every one of the hundreds of Pokemon, and now most of that has been culled down to combined lists that, for someone who cares more about Pokemon’s place in the world than the world of Pokemon, the content is more useful (and easier to maintain).

The deletion process works well enough, and Everett’s “busy bodies” are conscientious enough on the whole, that there’s very little chance for Joe the Plumber to get deleted. (In fact the real debate is on whether a search for Joe will send people to a subsection of the article on the presidential debates, where Joe also gets considerable coverage, and even still, it looks like the separate article will remain in place.)

4. It just works.

It just sort-of works. There is a lot of room for improvement, but the mechanism isn’t clear.

Like most who’ve commented here, I’m an inclusionist. But, in relation to biographical entries, there are some practical problems that don’t go away when you move away from paper. This page lists about 20 people whose names are variants on James Baker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baker_(disambiguation)
It looks as if some of them may have been deleted as not notable.

Regardless of what you think about particular decisions, there’s an obvious potential problem if you have to search through dozens of similar entries, most of no interest to anybody. Among CTers listed, I think only Henry shares an entry – Eszter’s uniqueness is assured, I think.

What’s wrong with the Skeletor entry?

It’s Walt’s complaint in action. Skeletor is a minor character in a minor toy/entertainment pantheon and oodles of effort has been put into it as opposed to something less useless. “The Question of Skeletor’s Head” takes up five long paragraphs alone. I see no reason for Skeletor to receive an article at all as opposed to a section in another article.

I’m personally for retention over deletion and I don’t like Walt’s rationale, but this is an example of the ratio of bullshit to “useful”* work.

*Eye of the beholder and so on but I think it’s reasonable to pick on Skeletor.

I think that the inclusionist instinct comes from asking, for each new article, whether the article is potentially interesting to readers. The deletionist instinct comes from asking whether the article is interesting to editors. The latter sounds self-centered but it touches an important aspect of Wikipedia. Quality control comes from having many interested eyes looking at every article (and “interested” ends up being a proxy for “knowledgeable” as well as for “busybody”). This happens naturally for things like sciences, hobbies, fandoms; you don’t have to be a Pokemon fan to understand that, yes, all of those Pokemon articles were being read and fact-checked and improved by a large number of volunteers, and those volunteers were having fun doing it because they found the process interesting.

If you imagine, on the other hand, a lone piano-roll collector uploading their database of 20,000 QRS player-piano rolls, or a middle-school student making articles on all of their school’s teachers, rooms, classes, etc.. How many people will edit these articles again? One? Two? Zero? Remember, if no one volunteers to do it, it doesn’t get done; it’s not like there’s an central authority, or incentive structure, to spread the work around. If the article isn’t interesting to editors in some way it doesn’t get edited.

Wikipedia’s many-eyes approach to quality control isn’t flawless, but it is an approach, and it gives a somewhat predictable levels of quality/accuracy that readers can come to expect. That breaks down entirely for few-editor, few-reader articles—the reader has no idea what to expect. You’d have one “Collaboratively Written Articles” version of Wikipedia covering popular-ish topics, and mixed with this you’d have the “Someone Uploaded This, Take It Or Leave It” version about obscure topics. Those things are different, and the idea that The Wikipedia Project should be one of them, and not the other, is defensible.

So the difference between a Keep and a Delete in this scheme is not “is the topic notable to readers?”, where Eszter as an academic and public intellectual would seem like an obvious Keep. It’s “how many editors will find this interesting enough to edit, thus making the authorship wiki-like?” For that … well, short academic bios are (a) numerous and (b) not so much fun to edit. So they lean towards Delete.

Judging by the Wikipedia entries, there doesn’t seem to be too much of a threat that the raging commercial successes of Wikia and Wikia Search (current market share 0.000079%) are going to overwhelm the nonprofit project.

The Pedigree of Swedish monarchs seems like it could be of use to someone, somehow.

John,

I think Seth’s point (and mine @60) is just that there is a commercial motivation for the leadership of wikipedia to push out a lot of the kinds of entries that make it fun. (Seth is also very sensitive to what he sees as exploitation of uncompensated labor in everything “open source”.) Not to say that if Wales hopes hard enough, he will make money on Wikia, just that it may effect how the non-profit evolves.

Also,

After a few clicks through mostly “rea is a girl who sits on the window sill smoking crack” random entries on deletionpedia, you get a lot of stuff like this:

List of popular songs based on classical music (deleted 10 Mar 2008 at 18:29)
Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta F’ Wit (deleted 02 Jul 2008 at 01:02)
Pokémon types (deleted 22 Jul 2008 at 17:51)
Core Energetics, theory of orgonist protege of fascinating quack Willhelm Reich
I Need A Freak (deleted 05 Mar 2008 at 23:26) (always wondered about that song)
MEX files, which has to do with a module in MATLAB that lets you run compiled C code

It’s a wonder of the digital age that, freed from the constraints of paper and binding, our encyclopaedists mostly want to create an online Britannica. But worse.

Ok, but what’s wrong with that? If there’s no interest in your entry, then nobody reads your “made-up garbage.” If there is interest, people will edit it to clean it up.

For one thing, because randomly running across too many entries like this will cause people to believe that everything in Wikipedia is made-up garbage and stop finding it useful or worth contributing too.

I don’t understand why there isn’t room for a billion entries.

I have no idea how Wikipedia is set up technically, but I’m sure hosting a billion entries or whatever would cost a lot more money than hosting the current number, no?

The only good reason to delete content, and by extension, a whole article, is if it is incorrect. The more people review an article, the more likely it is to be factually correct. Deleting an article of little interest may be throwing out information useful to someone. Why not retain it, and add a note that this article has been reviewed by an insufficient number of people – the editors can decide on the cut off number – and therefore its accuracy cannot be vouched for?

@82: “The more people review an article, the more likely it is to be factually correct.”

Oh boy, if only we could apply that logic to everything. How does the old saying go? “Eat shit, a hundred billion flies can’t be wrong…”

A lot of the deletionistas are not motivated by some of the sensible reasons for deletion given in this thread, but more out of a sense of personal outrage against the inclusion of garbage or trivia in “their” encyclopedia. They seem to think that you cannot have an entry on Skeletor and be seen as a serious encyclopedia, or that if onyl all the trivia is gone, people will work on the serious issues.

It’s incredibly annoying because what makes Wikipedia great is not the information you could’ve also found in the Encyclopedia Brittannica, but all the information there usually isn’t room for in a proper encyclopedia, or which is divided amongst zillions of specialist encyclopedias, all in one place. You can go from the history of the Third Reich all the way back to the type of machine gun used at the battle of Kursk and back, and where else can you do this? Not only that, but where else can you look up information on no matter how obscure a subject easily?

Can anyone help me understand why some people are so vehemently opposed to certain people (or topics) having entries on Wikipedia? Why do people get so worked up about the mere existence of certain entries?

They are called deletionists and they are obsessed with demoving topics from Wikipedia that they deem not notable enough. No I don’t know why either.

Currently, an entry for Joe the Plumber is being debated. Does it really dilute the value of Wikipedia to have entries like that?

Not in my opinion. Which is why I’ve created Includipedia, an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia.

I remember when some people contested my entry (I wasn’t the one to put it up), it felt like some amateurish tenure review, except with not quite the same consequences.

If you (or anyone) want to put up an article on yourself on Includipedia, it’s fine by me.

French radio just announced JTP’s name is Sam, a non-plumber with fiscal issues.

@10: “He was a Muslim and felt that every hadith (recorded tradition from the time of Muhammad; there are many thousands) should have its own article. Of course, every person mentioned in any of these hadith should have his or her own article too.”

Why shouldn’t every hadith have its own article? People who are interested will find them useful. People who aren’t interested won’t see them, so won’t be inconvenienced.

@34 Walt: “Who wants to work on an encyclopedia that’s full of fifty million shitty entries?”

Fifty million people who’re interested in things you think are shit.

For those with half a brain and at least a half-open perspective on the subject, the curious inter-relationship between Wikipedia and Wikia, Inc. is explored here:

The tight-knit web of Wikimedia and Wikia

It’s a bit of a polemic, but take your pick, any one of the points made is enough to give pause.

I should acknowledge that Timon and Tom Scudder have come up with some evidently useful pages deleted. So concede that it happens.

But, I think 61, 69 and 74 make a pretty solid case for some deletions. In particular, the argument that without the possibility of deleting articles that meet minimum standards there would be less effort put into getting articles to meet those standards, seems very convincing. As with most social norms, efforts to enfore them are locally irrational but get you to a better equilibrium overall.

As somebody or other, said:

“How does it hurt you?” That, my friends, is the coolly rational voice of homo economicus. While H.E. has his virtues, and can often help you think straight, sometimes you just have to tell him to fuck off.

I am not! I’m not even a girl.

So you claim. So why don’t you edit the entry, hmmm? To quote a Wikipedian : “Don’t wave your hand with a pompous air of authority, get them dirty by actually contributing.”

I’m a long-standing Wikipedia contributor who is generally pretty inclusionist. But there are issues here that aren’t getting paid attention to that make deletion more reasonable than it is portrayed here. First, there’s the navigation issue: If one looks at the page for almost any popular name (to use an extreme example: “John Smith” ) even with current standards it is almost impossible to find a specific person by that name since there are so many. If all you know about the person is the name and not much else then finding the Wikipedia article could b e difficult.

Second, the issue of libelous content is not getting enough attention. This obviously isn’t an issue with Joe the Plumber but for many articles it is a problem. If an article is not widely watched then the probability that it will problematic claims on it is much higher.

Third, there are issues of neutrality and verifiability. If a topic has few or no reliable sources talking about it we can easily get fights between editors about what is correct. Even when topics have reliable sources talking about them such disagreements are common. Without reliable sourcing there is no easy way to resolve such disputes.

Fourth, Wikipedia is not a free webhost. The project runs on what amounts to a shoe-string budget. The entire Wikimedia Foundation which runs all the Wikimedia projects (the various language Wikipedias including the English Wikipedia, the various language Wikinews, etc.) runs on a total budget of about 3 million dollars a year. That’s not a lot for one of the most widely visited websites on the planet (contrast this for example the budget for youtube or even just cnn.com). We’re not trying to make a free webhost and websites devoted to that (generally paying by way of advertisements) already exist. If there were no inclusion criteria we would become quickly overwhelmed with such material (this is not to say that that this is an argument for strict inclusion criteria merely an argument that we need some such criteria).

Overall, the arguments for deletionism are stronger than portrayed in most of the comments above.

Oh, the biggest thing I hate about Wikipedia-apologists: if you complain about an error, it ipso facto becomes your fault for not fixing it.

@98 Walt: Don’t be a crazy person, Cabalamat.

Don’t be so arrogant as to tell 50 million people that what interests them is “shitty”, Walt.

So as long as people do not read or edit those articles, a much larger number than the present one is probably affordable.

Yeah, sure, storage is dirt cheap now (I work with 100s of Gigs every day) but if all of these sites get only 1 hit per year, that’s still 1 billion times that the servers have to send data – I don’t think that would be cheap, but I really don’t know either.

The question:” Is deletionism within the spirit of “open source” and the collaborative effort that Wikipedia was in its early days before anyone could afford to delete pages?”

It says “If you don’t want your writing to be edited mercilessly…” then “don’t submit it”. It does not say, if you want your knowledge deleted, we will do that. I have always thought that a lot of the policies at Wikipedia (and I should know I was an administrator for several years and also very active in the Meta world and with things like dispute resolution) are in violation of the implied covenant of “good faith and fair dealing” that is inherent in any open source licensing agreement such as the GFDL. Sure people can pick and choose what to export from WP but if they become part of the collaborative project (as opposed to sharecroppers working for the massa) then each WP “editor” volunteer should respect the contribution of others and conserve all knowledge, no matter how trivial; and not just toss out the baby with the bathwater.

As far as hardware, storage and bandwidth is concerned: until some really nasty folks got the idea that WP could be used to raise a lot of money for their salaries we were only spending money on hardware, storage and bandwidth. The reality is that anyone can make a mirror copy of the WP database and host it themselves, or archive it. The problem is now there is something more “important” than making WP work by volunteers, in fact if you look at the HR issue at WP’s governing “foundation” the money they get no longer goes to these kinds of costs, it goes to staff. Mostly the people there have wasted a lot of the contributions that were made to get it up and running on things like trips, corporate type salaries and legal fees paid to the same lawyer that started Wikia, Inc. for Jimbo Wales and his pirates, hmmm, imagine that! What do you think that means? The real problem is that WP was not started on true altruism, it was started by greedy semi-retired day traders who were looking to cash in on the internet boom. That has always been clear to those of us who know what was really going on in the early days.

Never too late to respond, and no doubt this guy had marginally encyclopedic reasons for contributing to Wikipedia. Even so I think we are better off with his effusions, and it is hard to imagine why a flag like “This article appears to have been provided by a religious editor on behalf of, or in hope of propagating, his or her religion” would be inadequate to qualify his contributions. Especially in the context of Hadiths, which I gather since reading your comment, are a universe of contention and interpretation. Plus, I would just love to read the tidbit about hadith 1004, which may have been composed in some valley in Yemen under some fascinating circumstances, which will only come up if it is easy for the person who knows about it to contribute to something like a Wikipedia page.

Timon @ 115 wrote:

Plus, I would just love to read the tidbit about hadith 1004, which may have been composed in some valley in Yemen under some fascinating circumstances, which will only come up if it is easy for the person who knows about it to contribute to something like a Wikipedia page.

Whose hadith 1004? Bukhari? Muslim? Each of the six major Sunni collections has its own numbering. Or could this be from a Shi’a or Ibadi collection?

There’s nothing wrong with an article on a hadith or a Bible verse that has provoked a great deal of controversy. An overview of the controversy, and links to the doctrinal questions involved, would be useful. However, a project to write articles on ALL hadith or verses would be nonsensical.

All this talk of deletionists and inclusionists and not one mention of the third (and best) way, mergism, which holds that while all information is eventually useful to someone and should be included, it doesn’t necessarily warrant its own article immediately and so should begin life as part of another. If the subject gains interest and grows, it can then branch off independently. Surely this is how paper encyclopædias work?

Whose hadith 1004? Bukhari? Muslim? Each of the six major Sunni collections has its own numbering. Or could this be from a Shi’a or Ibadi collection?

This is exactly why you need an entry for each one, to situate each one in the different traditions.

Can you give an example of a useful entry that was deleted?

AHEM.

If I said, “That anthropology journal, page 57” and you couldn’t find it, does that mean that we need an article for page 57, listing all page 57s?

If that page 57 has been generating centuries of debate the need is obvious.

RB, you are just arguing foor the sake of arguing now.

Still, Zora’s page 57 example is not about a silly creator but about the limits of inclusion. If page 57 is notable on its own it may need an article, like Page Three.