The Wikipedia deletion game

by Eszter Hargittai on October 16, 2008

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? Currently, an entry for Joe the Plumber is being debated. Does it really dilute the value of Wikipedia to have entries like that? 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. Would anyone care to defend the practice? I’m eager to understand the motivations better.

{ 128 comments }

1

notsneaky 10.16.08 at 6:18 pm

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.

2

pfox 10.16.08 at 6:28 pm

@Eszter

The quick answer is that Wikipedia ran by a bunch of basement-dwelling, self-appointed autocrats with too much time on their hands (I suppose that seems contradictory given the faux-democratic nature of Wikipedia, but every popular article has it’s own self-appointed “protector(s)”, complete with auto-edit-reverting bot(s), pending the protector’s subsequent review and approval).

Take a tour through the talk page for any vaguely “controversial” entry (ones involving Israel/”Jewish issues” in general tend to be the most easily discoverable and entertaining) and you can observe a raft of totally heated, qualitative assertions hinding behind the cloak of any number of contradictory wikipedia policies on what makes something “wiki-worthy”.

3

Timon 10.16.08 at 6:29 pm

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.

4

Timon 10.16.08 at 6:31 pm

Make that Deletionpedia.

5

Andrew R. 10.16.08 at 6:34 pm

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!

6

Everett 10.16.08 at 6:35 pm

Reading through the Wiki debates on the merits a particular entry, I’ve been struck time and again to their resemblance to small community meetings like zoning boards or neighborhood advisory commissions. Participants at such meetings can, in my experience, be fairly easily divided into three types: the busy bodies, the recently engaged, and the loons.

The busy bodies are those folks who attend every meeting, know every issue, enjoy the status quo, and don’t appreciate the appearance of the recently engaged to muck up a perfectly good meeting. The recently engaged are those folks who haven’t really attended such meetings before (and probably won’t in the future), but are attending now because an issue has come up that impacts their life (e.g., the neighbor next door is asking for a variance to build a 3rd story on their house). Finally, there’s the loon. This person also attends every meeting, but only to take his or her allotted two minutes to alert the board/council to the growing menace of fluoridated chalk dust or, perhaps, the berate the board/council for their role in persecuting the innocent loon for exercising his constitutionally-protected right to store his feces in tupperware containers in his front yard.

Anyway, at community meetings, these folks typically appear in the following ratio: 75:24:1. On Wikipedia, they typically appear in this ratio: 98:0:2. So, as far as I can tell, Wikipedia is run almost entirely by busy-bodies and loons and that, Eszter, is why those Wiki review panels are so effing weird.

7

Ian 10.16.08 at 6:40 pm

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.)

8

Reid 10.16.08 at 6:48 pm

Don’t underestimate the power of loons! Look at any alternative medicine topic and you’ll find a long history of reverts and screeds against the Western Medical Conspiracy. Don’t get me started on the guy that meticulously preened the Turkish, Japanese, and Chinese tea ceremony pages but angrily deleted and defaced anything related to the English tea tradition.

God help you if you point out the limitations of traditional printed encyclopedias that wikipedia remedies. Publishers limited the size of print editions due to cost and difficulty of searching, two issues that hardly exist with Wikipedia.

Wikipedia can be nearly infinite and has a handy search function. Why the hell not?

9

Paul Gowder 10.16.08 at 6:52 pm

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. :-)

10

Zora 10.16.08 at 7:00 pm

I remember one editor who just LOVED to create articles. He clearly believed that every book he read should have an article. 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. This enthusiastic editor would create twenty, forty, sixty articles a day and then engage in extended battles with anyone who dared to propose any of them for deletion. Because this was clearly anti-Muslim prejudice.

That’s why there are deletionists.

11

Kieran Healy 10.16.08 at 7:02 pm

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

I keed, I keed.

12

PersonFromPorlock 10.16.08 at 7:11 pm

My experience has been that there are a lot of people, especially in academe, for whom words are the true reality. So when they change the words they change the reality to something they’re more comfortable with.

I had a lot of trouble believing this phenomenon when I first ran across it, but it’s true: people who live by words sometimes become confused as to what is the symbol and what is the thing itself.

13

Brian 10.16.08 at 7:12 pm

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!

14

notsneaky 10.16.08 at 7:30 pm

Re: 4
I can’t believe they deleted Mohgborr!

And #9 is exactly right. Wiki’s just one of those things where, despite whatever improvements are gonna happen on the margin, you just have to take the good with the bad.

15

Jon 10.16.08 at 7:30 pm

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

16

don't quote me on this 10.16.08 at 8:03 pm

Hey Eszter, you may be interested in the following HBS case study on Wikipedia:

http://courseware.hbs.edu/public/cases/wikipedia/

It includes the wonderful abbreviation AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTD.

17

marcel 10.16.08 at 8:03 pm

This link might be a useful addition to this thread.

18

Seth Finkelstein 10.16.08 at 8:09 pm

If we’re adding useful links:

“I’m on Wikipedia, get me out of here”

[Eventually successful, after grueling ordeal-by-Wikipedia-cult]

19

MikeJ 10.16.08 at 8:20 pm

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.

20

lemuel pitkin 10.16.08 at 8:26 pm

One thing that occurred to me after hte last go-round on this topic was that people with strongly negative veiws of Wikipedia almost always focus on the discussion pages. But the vast majority of us ordinary Wiki users never glance at a discussion page, so the internal dynamics are irrelevant.

What we care about is the content of the articles themselves — that they are accurate, don’t have major gaps in coverage, and offer good pointers to more authoritative sources. As long as that’s true — and I’ve yet to see significant examples to the contrary –, it really doesn’t matter what the cranks and busybodies do behind closed doors.

21

Eszter Hargittai 10.16.08 at 8:34 pm

Just to clarify, I get why there is disagreement as to the content of entries, that’s rather obvious in many cases.

It’s the deletion part that seems silly precisely for the reasons Reid mentioned. So what if a topic/person is not notable enough? In that case few people will ever pull up the page, which will presumably mean little strain on the resources. If lots of people do pull it up then isn’t it serving the purpose of informing people about a topic? Is it reasonable that someone interested in Joe the Plumber should have to read through a page on the debates to get an idea of who he is? (If anything, it would clutter up the page on the debates to have the info there.)

Everett, do you teach? I love your description, if you teach, it must be fun to listen to your lectures.

Kieran, if I ever talk about Wikipedia in a class, I may just have to start with that quote.

LP, the point here is that 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.

22

KAS 10.16.08 at 8:34 pm

Lemuel Pitkin,

I second that.

KAS

23

Righteous Bubba 10.16.08 at 8:43 pm

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.

24

Walt 10.16.08 at 8:43 pm

Part of the appeal of contributing to Wikipedia is the sense that you’re working on something not stupid. I used to contribute pretty heavily, when I realized that while I might spend half an hour researching some substantive topic, someone else in the same amount of time would write 5 Pokemon articles off the top of their heads. If nobody held the line for what was sufficiently notable, then Wikipedia would be 95% trivia. What would be the reward in producing the 5%?

25

lemuel pitkin 10.16.08 at 8:45 pm

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.

26

Righteous Bubba 10.16.08 at 8:47 pm

If nobody held the line for what was sufficiently notable, then Wikipedia would be 95% trivia. What would be the reward in producing the 5%?

That 5%. You need never see the other 95%.

27

lemuel pitkin 10.16.08 at 8:48 pm

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

28

Walt 10.16.08 at 8:51 pm

But for me, at least, the point of working on Wikipedia is not the satisfaction of working on one good article, but being part of a big collective project that didn’t suck. Without drawing the line somewhere, it would collectively suck.

29

Eszter Hargittai 10.16.08 at 8:53 pm

LP, this is not about my having an entry, naively it didn’t even occur to me that anyone would read this post as being about that. (That issue got resolved over two years ago, but perhaps I’ve become less notable since then so someone will decide to start a new thread on it.) I have a considerable presence online with or without Wikipedia so that makes it less of a concern and not an example of the types of entries I think are most interesting to discuss here.

Not having entries like Joe the Plumber makes Wikipedia less useful for those who want to learn about Joe the Plumber (or any number of other people/topics that get deleted).

The widespread practice of idiosyncratic deletion is precisely why I don’t contribute to Wikipedia. It seems like a complete waste of time to put in the effort only to have someone possibly in no way knowledgeable about the topic come and delete it. Why bother taking that risk?

30

Righteous Bubba 10.16.08 at 8:57 pm

Without drawing the line somewhere, it would collectively suck.

It already collectively sucks from that standpoint: there is a massive amount of trivia there, as witnessed in the absurd Skeletor article. The joy is that you only see what you’re interested in, and for my embarrassing interests I mostly get what I want.

31

notsneaky 10.16.08 at 8:58 pm

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!

32

lemuel pitkin 10.16.08 at 9:07 pm

Not having entries like Joe the Plumber makes Wikipedia less useful for those who want to learn about Joe the Plumber

But Wikipedia *has* an entry for Joe the Plumber! (and the vast majority of comments on the discussion page are either for keeping it, or keeping it as part of another page.)

Now I’m even more confused. Your objection seems to be that anyone in the Wikipedia community could disagrees on the relevance of Je the Plumber? but why should consensus on this have been reached instantaneouusly?

Surely, if debates about relevance are legitimate at all, this article is a reasonable subject for one, no?

33

Eszter Hargittai 10.16.08 at 9:10 pm

LP, I question why anyone would question any entry. I don’t understand why there isn’t room for a billion entries. If someone has the time to create one, so be it. If it’s so irrelevant, presumably no one will see it. Why is that a problem?

34

Walt 10.16.08 at 9:15 pm

Eszter, I already answered that. Who wants to work on an encyclopedia that’s full of fifty million shitty entries?

35

Righteous Bubba 10.16.08 at 9:21 pm

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?

36

Righteous Bubba 10.16.08 at 9:22 pm

Living at Y business might not be so hot if it’s a smelter or something.

37

HH 10.16.08 at 9:24 pm

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.

38

engels 10.16.08 at 9:25 pm

f someone has the time to create one, so be it. If it’s so irrelevant, presumably no one will see it. Why is that a problem?

(1) Damaging the wikipedia ‘brand’ (as Walt says)
(2) Danger of such entries being created for (a) self-promotion, (b) promotion of commercial interests, (c) promotion of a political agenda
(3) Entries which are of interest to very few people are likely to suffer from minimal supervision are so would be especially likely to contain to inaccuracies, defamatory material, and so on

39

Timon 10.16.08 at 9:25 pm

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.

40

lemuel pitkin 10.16.08 at 9:27 pm

I question why anyone would question any entry.

Look, every single online medium works hard to exclude spam. CT very much included. Why should Wikipedia be the one exception? And like it or not Wiki does have a kind of authority, which they quite reasonably want to use discriminately. But whether you or I think Wikipedia should have a standard of relevance is, well, irrelevant; it *does* have such a standard, and given that, its application in this case seems entirely reasonable.

Personally, I’m inclined to beleive that the vast majority of deleted articles are irerelevant, and would just waste the time of people who happened on them while looking for something else. (Your entry is still there, and seems informative enough.) Can you give an example of a useful entry that was deleted?

41

Clay Shirky 10.16.08 at 9:28 pm

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.

42

notsneaky 10.16.08 at 9:31 pm

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

Moghborr!
At least useful to someone.

43

lemuel pitkin 10.16.08 at 9:32 pm

38 and 41 make the case for deletions rather well.

44

Eszter Hargittai 10.16.08 at 9:33 pm

I guess we disagree on what damages a brand. My regard for Wikipedia plummeted when I learned about the deletion issues. First, it’s too idiosyncratic (it’s hardly the experts who make the decisions). Second, it’s a disincentive for people to contribute thereby possibly decreasing the quality. After all, an argument could be made that 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).

Engels, it’s not as though there isn’t plenty of room for the dangers you list regardless.

45

hermit greg 10.16.08 at 9:36 pm

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.

46

lemuel pitkin 10.16.08 at 9:39 pm

Moghborr. I’d call this another strong argument for the deletionist side.

There’s no reason someone couldn’t start an open Wiki with no deletions. But I think the advantages of the current model would very rapidlly become clear…

47

lemuel pitkin 10.16.08 at 9:45 pm

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.

48

Eszter Hargittai 10.16.08 at 9:46 pm

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

I think we’ve established that what is useful to one is not necessarily useful to another, isn’t that the source of the disagreement here?

I looked up someone recently and fortunately she had an entry. It was helpful to me. There was a “to be deleted” banner up on top. If I hadn’t stumbled upon the entry at that time then it would have likely been gone a few days later. Had I then looked a few days later, I wouldn’t have found anything. I removed the banner and so far the entry remains on the site. I won’t mention specifics so people won’t go attack it now.

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.

49

Mary 10.16.08 at 9:48 pm

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?

50

Mary 10.16.08 at 9:49 pm

In #49 the last paragraph should also be quoted: Laugher’s words, not mine.

51

lemuel pitkin 10.16.08 at 9:51 pm

48-

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

52

notsneaky 10.16.08 at 9:54 pm

“If I hadn’t stumbled upon the entry at that time then it would have likely been gone a few days later.”

Well, as Nicholson Baker points out in the really good read article that hermet greg linked too, there is the ARS (Article Rescue Squadron) and the WPPDP (Wiki Project Proposed Deletion Patrolling) which tries to take articles off the delete list.

I think with Moghborr the thing is, yeah it is utterly not notable but who cares, and deleting such obscure but harmless articles goes against the Wiki spirit. Basically, I support deletion if it’s a case of commercial/political advertising or POV pushing. I got no problem with the Moghborrs of the Wiki world.

53

Michael Drake 10.16.08 at 10:01 pm

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

54

D. Eppstein 10.16.08 at 10:04 pm

If it’s so irrelevant, presumably no one will see it.

Not true. The people who put the irrelevant stuff into Wikipedia want it to be seen, so they also clutter the useful articles with trivia sections and see-also links to their irrelevant stuff, making it harder to find the meat. It’s easier to keep the informative articles informative if the uninformative ones aren’t there to be linked to.

Look, if you really want an implementation of Borges’ Library of Babel, it’s easy enough to do: just write a program to produce random sequences of ASCII characters. But I think you can imagine how useless the output of such a program would be as a repository of knowledge. Why would you want to push Wikipedia more in that direction?

55

lemuel pitkin 10.16.08 at 10:06 pm

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?

56

HH 10.16.08 at 10:07 pm

This discussion about poor, wayward Wikipedia is occurring as Wikipedia blows past all conventional “competition” and begins to rival Google as a colossally comprehensive knowledge store. Quibbling over minor dissension among Wikipedists ignores these simple facts:

1. It is growing faster than any competitor and already dwarfs commercial encyclopedias in scale.

2. It exhibits a remarkable degree of self-organization and self-regulation.

3. It has no conventional institutional control apparatus.

4. It just works.

Shall we clutch our pearls about Google next?

57

JP Stormcrow 10.16.08 at 10:07 pm

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.

58

Eszter Hargittai 10.16.08 at 10:10 pm

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

Had I searched two days later, it wouldn’t be. And important to note here is that I wouldn’t be able to list it as a counterexample precisely because I wouldn’t even know if an entry had been there in the first place. (Now, thanks to Deletionpedia I guess I will be able to find out, but others who don’t know about it won’t.)

59

typewritttten 10.16.08 at 10:16 pm

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

60

Timon 10.16.08 at 10:22 pm

Does anyone else feel that the deletionist campaign ratcheted up when Jimmy Wales started trying to get all the weird fandom marginalia moved over to his for-profit Wikia?

61

Sage Ross 10.16.08 at 10:23 pm

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.)

62

sg 10.16.08 at 10:27 pm

What’s wrong with the Skeletor entry? Where else can I learn all that stuff about Skeletor easily? Why is it trivial to have information on Skeletor on an online format where that information takes up a trivial amount of space?

It’s not as if the availability of Skeletor info for those who need it is pushing more important info off your bookshelf is it?

63

Watson Aname 10.16.08 at 10:36 pm

4. It just works.

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

64

pj 10.16.08 at 10:41 pm

In essence deletion of an article is simply an extension of deletion of content within an article.

You wouldn’t argue that all article content ought not to be deleted because someone might find it interesting (the Ronnie Hazlehurst incident is a good example of the failings of wikipedia fact checking and sourcing standards in this regard) so why should things like the series of articles that existed (for quite a while) all ending in ‘…apartheid’ (‘American apartheid’, ‘Saudi Arabian apartheid’, ‘Israeli apartheid’ – all entirely distinct from other articles like ‘racial segregation in the United States’) be preserved to mislead people stumbling on them and provide a politicised and biased soap box? Or putatively definitional entries (like ‘Pallywood’) that also serve as ‘point of view forks’ allowing partisans to have their own protected spaces to expound their views.

65

John Quiggin 10.16.08 at 10:44 pm

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.

66

notsneaky 10.16.08 at 10:45 pm

“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?”

Baker gives several examples. Even of an organized campaign to delete what I think a lot (though not all) people would consider genuinely useful articles.

67

Righteous Bubba 10.16.08 at 11:00 pm

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.

68

Xanthippas 10.16.08 at 11:02 pm

Why do people get so worked up about the mere existence of certain entries? Currently, an entry for Joe the Plumber is being debated. Does it really dilute the value of Wikipedia to have entries like that? 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. Would anyone care to defend the practice?

I’ve wondered the same things multiple times. I guess I’m what you would call an inclusionist, though perhaps moreso than others in that I don’t really understand why a supposedly limitless online encyclopedia should be that concerned about the “notability ” of subjects of entries. I think there are a lot of people who are genuinely interested in maintaining some level of standards at Wikipedia, which I understand, but I’m not sure why Wikipedia shouldn’t attempt to catalog everything, no matter how minor. And from what I’ve read on discussion pages, a lot of the anti-inclusion sentiment comes from people who seem to operate with an in-group/out-group mentality; it’s “their” Wikipedia and if they don’t personally regard a subject as notable, then it doesn’t meet Wikipedia’s standards for notability.

69

BM 10.16.08 at 11:05 pm

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.

70

Seth Finkelstein 10.16.08 at 11:08 pm

[Repost to try to avoid spam-trap]

By the way, I don’t think this matters for the case of “Joe the Plumber”, but note the co-Founder of Wikipedia also runs a for-profit commercial $14 million venture-capital backed digital-sharecropping wiki ad-farm, “Wikia Inc”. This was described in one article (not mine) as “… his effort to take the success – and, indeed, the underlying philosophy – of Wikipedia, and commercialise the hell out of it”
Let me put this v-e-r-y carefully: There have been questions raised, and problems of appearance of conflict of interest, about the existence of financial incentives to move things away from nonprofit Wikipedia, where nobody makes money off it, and instead put them on Wikia Inc sites, so that the presumed revenues from advertising can enrich the shareholders of that company.

This is not the whole of the deletionism debate by any means. But there have been suspicions of thumb-on-the-scale factors.

For background details vis-a-vis Wikia Inc and ad-farm, see my column:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/25/wikipedia.internet

Wikipedia isn’t about human potential, whatever Jimmy Wales says

71

John Quiggin 10.16.08 at 11:30 pm

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.

72

Righteous Bubba 10.17.08 at 12:05 am

Deletion sort of scares me in a historical sense. Are articles that are old and unloved going to be subject to deletion? 50 years from now are things going to be deleted based on contemporary notability?

73

Tom Scudder 10.17.08 at 12:08 am

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

74

Frank Quist 10.17.08 at 12:27 am

Running a bit with Clay Shirky’s comment here…

If I make an article about my cat, I am the only person in the know on the subject. This means that the entry cannot be defended against falsehoods, and there can be no oversight. There might be ways to enforce some sort of correctness and avoid abuse, but if everybody makes an article on their cat, there will not be enough resources for this.
For cat entries, you could say the original author is probably trustworthy enough. But what if I contribute a rather spiteful and false article about someone in the local village government, or about the poor bullied kid in class?

Running with that I think notability standards such as the requirement of some sort of “major” media reference make perfect sense. Counting the amount of google entries for a person to determine notability makes less sense.

I like tying this to “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. This theorem is a way in which Wikipedia hopes to stay notable. It won’t work if every person in the phone book is wiki worthy, though.

75

Timon 10.17.08 at 12:27 am

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

76

sean 10.17.08 at 1:16 am

*Please* don’t tell me you’re another one of those “Wikipedia are fascists” folks. The “not notable” rule exists to keep nobodies like me (and their friends) from making their own entries full of made-up garbage. “Joe the Plumber” is a 15-minute celbrity.

77

Dr Zen 10.17.08 at 2:40 am

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.

78

Xanthippas 10.17.08 at 5:25 am

The “not notable” rule exists to keep nobodies like me (and their friends) from making their own entries full of made-up garbage. “Joe the Plumber” is a 15-minute celbrity.

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. And if I recall correctly, you can delete entries for flaws beyond notability of the subject matter. I frankly don’t understand why notability is even a requirement; it’s far too objective, pointless given the limitless nature of an online encyclopedia, and there are other categories of flaws that permit substantial revision or deletion of a bad entry.

79

D. Eppstein 10.17.08 at 6:22 am

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.

80

Anonymous 10.17.08 at 6:56 am

Ok, but what’s wrong with that? If there’s no interest in your entry, then nobody reads your “made-up garbage.”

This is ignoring a big part of the social environment surrounding Wikipedia. Some people and organizations desperately want to be in Wikipedia, and they put a lot of effort into crafting impressively padded entries for themselves. This actually does succeed in making them look good to the unsophisticated: many people do use the length of a Wikipedia page as a proxy for importance.

The net effect is bad for society. It distorts the public’s impression of who and what is important, and a lot of time is wasted creating fluffy pages that serve no purpose other than exaggerating the importance of the subject.

In practice, it’s impossible to keep people from making entries for themselves. One can often guess that this is happening, but it’s hard to prove (and people can always recruit friends to do their dirty work). Setting a high bar for notability eliminates 95% of the problems, since it restricts Wikipedia entries to cases with enough popularity that many people will want to edit them and make sure they are reasonable.

81

novakant 10.17.08 at 8:25 am

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?

82

Bruce Baugh 10.17.08 at 8:39 am

D. Eppstein: But people will come to a given junk page only in two circumstances (I think). They deliberately searched for something really obscure – which means there’s at least a little interest in it, and it shouldn’t be hard to set up a watch list of pages viewed a small number of times greater than zero. Or they got there via some sort of random process, or by a listing like the one described above, which means that they’re making an effort to do something structural, for the overall good of the wiki.

83

krhasan 10.17.08 at 9:02 am

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?

84

Zamfir 10.17.08 at 9:06 am

Novakant, the answer might be surprisingly close to”No it doesn’t”, although I am not 100% sure. Even a billion articles add upt oonly a few terabyte of storage, if they are small, pure-text articles.( There are probably copies, I do not know how many)

Compared to the bandwidth usage of Wikipedia, that can’t be too expensive.
So as long as people do not read or edit those articles, a much larger number than the present one is probably affordable.

85

Lex 10.17.08 at 9:22 am

@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…”

86

Seth Finkelstein 10.17.08 at 10:36 am

John (#71), yes, what Timon said (#75). In fact, there was just recently a discussion on Jimmy Wales’s Wikipedia user “talk” page about this point, where he expressed sentiments that – again, phrasing carefully – without saying definitely, one could cynically read them as implying he’d like more fan-style articles off of Wikipedia (no money for him) and onto Wikia ($$$ for him). Note, as I am a known critic, I’m not the only person who had uncharitable thoughts. Some dedicated Wikpedia article-writers expressed discontent with his views.

“Jimbo, so you’d seriously delete articles that the community has decided to feature? Now I don’t call myself an inclusionist, but there are five volunteers who worked very hard for many months to earn a spot here. I look at this thread and shake my head; to them your post has got to be a punch in the gut.”

“What has changed since your original proclamation to make you reconsider? The cynical side of me says it’s the for profit Wikia you launched which would love said articles and their traffic… but I hope it’s wrong.”

[Disclaimer again, this is not by any means the whole of the debate, but it’s arguably a relevant factor overall]

87

Martin Wisse 10.17.08 at 10:49 am

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?

88

sean 10.17.08 at 11:19 am

@78: D. Eppstein (79) gets the main point. I suspect that without notability, you would end up with a big part of Wikipedia being something like Myspace or Facebook. Both have their place, but I don’t think it makes sense to have either be part of an encyclopedia.

89

Cabalamat 10.17.08 at 11:49 am

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.

90

Cabalamat 10.17.08 at 11:56 am

And if they do delete it from Wikipedia, it’s still on Includipedia: Joe the plumber

91

Fr. 10.17.08 at 11:58 am

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

92

Xanthippas 10.17.08 at 12:04 pm

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 would think there are quite a few people who think that already, given the number of stories in the press about inaccurate Wikipedia entries (or this Onion article, which parodies Wikipedia’s inaccuracies…and is a fair reflection of what most people think of the reliability of Wikipedia, in my opinion.) And I use Wikipedia not because it’s definitive or reliable, but because it’s a handy beginning or summary for most topics I’m curious about. I just don’t see how any concerns about the notability or noteworthiness of a topic should at all be relevant to Wikipedia.

93

Cabalamat 10.17.08 at 12:23 pm

@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.

94

Cabalamat 10.17.08 at 12:41 pm

@33 Eszter Hargittai: “LP, I question why anyone would question any entry. I don’t understand why there isn’t room for a billion entries. If someone has the time to create one, so be it. If it’s so irrelevant, presumably no one will see it. Why is that a problem?”

Of course it isn’t a problem. You’re evidently an inclusionist, i.e. a sane person.

95

Cabalamat 10.17.08 at 12:43 pm

@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.

96

rea 10.17.08 at 1:20 pm

“rea is a girl who sits on the window sill smoking crack”

I am not! I’m not even a girl.

97

Gregory Kohs 10.17.08 at 1:35 pm

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.

98

Walt 10.17.08 at 1:44 pm

Don’t be a crazy person, Cabalamat.

99

lemuel pitkin 10.17.08 at 2:09 pm

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.

100

mabisa 10.17.08 at 2:32 pm

Quite frankly, moderated and regulated web communities provably produce more worthwhile content than those that are unregulated (note the differences, for example, between AskMetafilter and Yahoo! Answers for the clear difference a few moderators and community guidelines can make). The “if you don’t care, you won’t see it” argument doesn’t really fly. Not all users navigate directly to a page; many use search and to wade through irrelevant and silly results seems and unecessary burden on the user. Given that Wikipedia results score highly in Google and other search engines, it is fair to say that the clogging of Wikipedia (not to say that all deleted entries are “clogging”) would have consequences outside of the encyclopedia itself. A lack of deletion policy–or a lessening of its standards–would almost certainly give way to increased vandalism and shenanigans on Wikipedia’s servers and bandwidth. Moreover, part of WP’s beauty is in the fact that its content is GPL’d, so it can all be easily mirrored and expanded upon elsewhere. We shall see if users find “notability” so suffocating that the deletionpedias and includipedias of the world take off.

101

engels 10.17.08 at 2:33 pm

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.”

102

Righteous Bubba 10.17.08 at 2:38 pm

Which is why I’ve created Includipedia, an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia.

That green is terribly ugly and there needs to be more space between the lines so superscript works properly.

103

Joshua Zelinsky 10.17.08 at 2:41 pm

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.

104

Lex 10.17.08 at 2:45 pm

@102: of course they are, but some people think the Internet runs on pixie-dust and wishes. You want 50 million shitty entries, buy your own server-farm!

105

Eszter Hargittai 10.17.08 at 3:23 pm

Martin Wisse makes an important point I haven’t been explicit about, but certainly agree with: it’s precisely the more obscure issues that are often of interest on Wikipedia. The really notable people and topics will have plenty of coverage on other easily accessible sites.

Regarding the argument about resources (102, 103), it seems to me that mere space is less costly than continuous traffic. If an entry is so obscure that few will visit it then it’s hard to see how it will be such horrible drain on the system. In contrast, the numerous reloads of pages and visits to the Talk section of the site debating deletion vs inclusion themselves require resources.

Lex, give me a break. Who do you think pays for hosting Crooked Timber and your comments here? It’s me and fellow Timberites. I am well aware of costs associated with running Web sites, I’ve been spending $$ on that since the mid 90s (not to suggest that one has to have personal experience to understand what’s involved).

106

mollymooly 10.17.08 at 4:50 pm

Re Joe the Plumber , agree with #7. “Deleting” the article means redirecting it to be a section of the presidential-debate article, where relevant info can still be presented.

Re trivia: (a)linking to trivia from serious articles is bad (see xkcd, but (b) keeping the trivial article is okay, and (c) linking from trivia to serious is great.
Deletionists think they need to have (b) to prevent (a), while I think we need to allow (b) to have (c), and Wikipedia is the only place where (c) is possible: some Simpsons wikia won’t be able to link to the Shakespeare play or Kurosawa film that’s being parodied.

On a broader note, there appears to be a move to reduce the number of intra-wiki hyperlinks in articles — not just the linking of “April 26” that everyone hates, but anything incidental to the subject. I don’t know if this disturbing trend has a name, but I suspect it’s cut from the same cloth as Deletionism.

107

mollymooly 10.17.08 at 4:58 pm

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.

108

Cabalamat 10.17.08 at 5:40 pm

@102: That green is terribly ugly and there needs to be more space between the lines so superscript works properly.

You’re right the style does need working on. It’s on the to-do list

@104 Lex: You want 50 million shitty entries, buy your own server-farm!

I have bought (or rather rented) my own server.

109

Cabalamat 10.17.08 at 5:43 pm

@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.

110

Lex 10.17.08 at 6:22 pm

Dear Eszter, I wasn’t talking about you. It is, however, a fact that if someone wants everything to be on the internet, someone is going to have to pony up. The ‘virtual’ world is actually very real, and exists on spinning platters powered by electricity someone’s generated, etc etc etc… The economic and related social implications of this can be debated, but the basic material fact itself needs recalling centrally in any such discussion.

Iain M. Banks calls it the Dependency Principle. Someone has to be minding the shop while we float further and further towards our Second/Third/Fourth Lives…

111

novakant 10.17.08 at 7:36 pm

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.

112

Timothy Horrigan 10.17.08 at 10:33 pm

The really un-noteable articles rarely get deleted, because no one even knows they’re there. And they don’t take up that much space, and it is simple enough to just tag and eventually prune the articles which no no one ever looks at.

The existence of a delete war proves paradoxically that a subject IS noteable. Usually the issue arises because someone (e.g., the McCain campaign) is embarrassed by the subject of the article. I got mixed up in a delete war over Vicki Iseman, his (alleged) girlfriend who ironically just reappeared in the news. The deleters wanted to delete her because she wasn’t noteable, since she wasn’t proven to be McCain’s mistress… ignoring the fact that the controversy over the article was a noteable event in and of itself. (Not to mention, ignoring the fact that even on her own merits she is more noteable than many other people in the Wikipedia: she is a well-known lobbyist.)

In the case of Joe the Plumber, he is probably MORE noteable than the debate itself. His name will live on for a little while at least in legend as an example of a particularly moronic political meme, even after people forget exactly when and how he came became legendary. The fact that the actual Joe was just some loudmouth from Ohio who wasn’t even a licensed plumber doesn’t make the myth of “Joe the Plumber” too irrelevant to put in the Wikipedia.

Both those articles by the way are fairly short: the discussion pages use up a lot more bandwidth than the actual articles.

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Alex R. 10.18.08 at 2:56 am

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.

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Zora 10.18.08 at 6:41 am

Perhaps too late to respond, but …

Timon @ 39:

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.

At the same time that the young editor was madly creating articles, there were articles re hadith; there were articles re the scholars who collected, sifted, and published hadith; there were articles re the prominent Muslims of early Islamic history. Rather than patiently expanding those articles, or writing extensively researched new articles about oft-cited hadith or prominent Muslims w/o articles, the young editor was creating articles that consisted of nothing much more than a title and a sentence. I think it made him feel important. He was expecting other people to fill out those articles, but no one ever did. We (in those days it was we, before I gave up in despair) were too busy working on topics of interest to more than one person.

As several people have observed, it’s of no use to create articles that no one else will ever edit.

As for the hadith: the canonical collections of hadith are available on the net (Muslim Student Association English translations) and *should*, when possible, be preserved in neutral fora like The Internet Archive or Wikisource. It isn’t a good use of anyone’s time or server space to break up those texts into separate articles, any more than it is to have a WP article for every dang verse in the New Testament. Yes to preserving religious texts; no to using WP to do it.

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Timon 10.18.08 at 9:13 am

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.

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Righteous Bubba 10.18.08 at 2:39 pm

We (in those days it was we, before I gave up in despair) were too busy working on topics of interest to more than one person.

Point for Seth and Walt.

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Zora 10.18.08 at 8:03 pm

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.

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D. Eppstein 10.18.08 at 11:20 pm

By the way, the “storage space” argument for deletion on Wikipedia doesn’t hold water. The deleted information is still there on the server taking up the same space it took up before it was deleted; deletion merely makes it not visible to normal users.

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Nick 10.19.08 at 10:41 am

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?

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Joshua Zelinsky 10.20.08 at 1:23 am

Nick, Mergism doesn’t work nearly as well in practice as one would like it to. People merge things and then after a while they get trimmed down as being only “tangentially related” or through similar logic. Mergism often ends up becoming slow deletion.

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Timon 10.20.08 at 2:05 am

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.

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john b 10.20.08 at 11:07 pm

Exciting storage fact: having a 1000-word article on each of the six billion people alive in the world would require storage costing a total of US$10,000. So anyone who thinks this is a relevant criterion is, officially, an idiot.

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Giblets 10.21.08 at 12:38 am

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

AHEM.

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Zora 10.21.08 at 7:07 pm

Timon @ 121

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.

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?

I don’t know where you got the hadith 1004 bit, but that’s not the way people refer to hadith. They say Bukhari 1.4.138 or Muslim 1.172. How many numbers you need depends on the collection.

(Had to look up the reference schemes; it had been a few years since I used the MSA hadith collection and I’d forgotten that hadith 1004 wouldn’t make sense as a reference.)

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Righteous Bubba 10.21.08 at 7:16 pm

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.

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lemuel pitkin 10.21.08 at 8:08 pm

RB, you are just arguing foor the sake of arguing now. What Zora said is:

the young editor was creating articles that consisted of nothing much more than a title and a sentence. … He was expecting other people to fill out those articles, but no one ever did.

Obviosuly, articles without content should be deleted, no?

In general, it’s easy to imagine reasons why wikipedians’ decisions are wrong — or anyone else’s. Give me a one-sentence summary of anything you’ve ever done, and I can tell a stroy about why you were wrong. But what’s the point?

If you want to discuss actual wikipedia deletion policy, all delete discussions are archived here. My quick survey suggests that deleted articles are overwhlmingly spam and fanfic/gamer stuff. Whenever someone articulated a reasonable argument for keeping an article, it was kept. Yes, I’m sure there are deletions that you or I disagree with. (Fafblog for starters.) But that’s to hold Wikipedia to a standard of perfection that no organization or publication can meet.

Anyway, I suspect you’ll find that reading actual delete discussion is a lot more informative than speculating about them. I certainly do!

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Righteous Bubba 10.21.08 at 8:19 pm

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

God damn this internets! How do I turn it off?

You’re right that the zealot was just posting things to have them filled out…I’ve done the same for some things, and it’s worked; there are enough busybodies eyeing article creation for that to pay off I guess.

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.

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lemuel pitkin 10.21.08 at 8:33 pm

If page 57 is notable on its own it may need an article, like Page Three.

And if not, not. Which is why Page Three does indeed have a Wikipedia page, and Page 57 does not. One more case of Wikipedia working the way any sensible person would expect.

What continues to amaze me is how many Wikipedia critics (including CT’s resident scholar of online communities) are so fixated on the occasional trees of individuals on Wikipedia who they disagree with that they completely miss the forest of a free, comprehensive, reliable reference source whose collective decision making structure works astonishingly well the vast majority of the time.

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