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Comment by Aissen | Hacker News Reader

Yes, deletionnists are driving people to other venues. Wikia often claims to run the world's biggest wiki once you aggregate all their communities. It's sad that the Wikimedia foundation let the deletionnists destroy so much value in Wikipedia without providing an alternative (like dedicated community wikis).

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Yes, for something that was trying to archive "the sum of all human knowledge", I always felt Wikipedia was rather selective about what it'd allow. WP has always been firmly an establishment outlet, only allowing things if they received a substantial number of citations in the mainstream press (and big outlets too, not local outlets).

I personally think there is a way to do a much better Wikipedia. One day I might try it.

"It's sad that the Wikimedia foundation let the deletionnists destroy so much value in Wikipedia without providing an alternative (like dedicated community wikis)."

Why should they, if Wikia does it?

Partly because Wikia is a for-profit, extremely unethical company. They stuff more ads than content on their wikis, force established brands to move to .wikia subdomains, force awful design changes on their users, and they don't hesitate copying content from other wiki bases such as Gamepedia.

(ATA: I was an admin on WoWWiki, one of their largest wiki, when it was sold to Wikia. I kept in touch with Wikia employees since.)

Well, the real point is "Why should they when somebody else can?" Especially since I don't strongly believe that Wikipedia will necessarily be "ad free" in, say, five or ten years. Time rolls on. Wikipedia should be focusing on making the best Wikipedia they can; let other focus on making the best community sites they can. We don't have to bundle everything into one organization.

Wikipedia is copyleft, and has a preemptive immuninty to ads. Is wikia?

Most Wikia sites seem to use some form of Creative Commons licensing: http://www.wikia.com/Licensing

I think fans contribute to Wikia more out of convenience and inertia.

This is why I tend to support wikis hosted elsewhere, or those that move away from Wikia. For example, the Bulbapedia site here is self hosted, and part of a Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance that encourages people to leave Wikia and join their network to avoid just this sort of thing:

http://www.niwanetwork.org/

They still get the odd email from a delusional Wikia staffer trying to get one of their sites to become a Wikia site, but they immediately turn them down.

Ready for the plot twist? It's also run by Jimmy Wales.

90% of me was sure this was a (humorous) joke. The other 10% fact-checked. Wow, twist indeed.

There have been so many exoduses off of Wikia from mid-sized wikis (let alone big ones like WoW Wiki). I'm one of them -- the Dungeons and Dragons Wiki. Around the time they stuffed that awful new skin onto everyone and told us that if we didn't like it, leave. We left. Deletionists ruined Wikipedia and greed ruined Wikia.

It was once a pretty good wiki farm, and I can't complain about the support. Then the skinpocalypse happened.

I understand this as an argument not to use Wikia, but not as an argument for why there is no other place on the whole wide Internet to host content besides Wikipedia itself.

New wikis are practically the hello-world project for every programming environment that can build a web app, so it's hard for me to understand what's so important about being hosted in Wikipedia, other than to ride on its SEO coat tails.

The simple answer is: why not?

Why shouldn't Wikipedia be the place for all factual, verifiable, minimally notable information in the world, so long as it's properly organized?

Wikipedia is a long long way from that goal, even if we exclude fictional-universe nonsense. Pick nearly any historical subject; dozens of books filled with information translate to a few sparse Wikipedia articles. That's terrible.

Wikipedia is the place for all factual, verifiable, minimally notable information. When stuff gets rejected from WP, it's almost always because it fails one of those three simple tests.

For instance: someone downthread complained that WP was missing coverage of local bands and an interesting BBC documentary. The BBC documentary should be in Wikipedia, and if it isn't, it's probably because whoever wrote the stub article for it wrote it poorly; someone else should re-add it. But the local bands most likely fail both notability and verifiability: if nobody has written about them, (a) chances are they aren't notable, and (b) whatever is notable about them can't be tied to a specific reliable source, which would make a Wikipedia article about the band original research.

A really common place you run into trouble with Wikipedia is when your proposed article breaks new facts about its subject. That's not supposed to happen. Wikipedia is a tertiary source; if it makes a claim, that claim needs to be sourced from something else. "Original research" is a confusing term for this, but it makes a lot of sense once you grok it. From the perspective of an encyclopedia, there isn't much difference between someone's random harebrained theory about cold fusion and a discussion of the lineup of some New York hardcore band nobody's ever heard of outside of NYC.

I think you and I have argued about this before, but I've never understood why "verifiable" isn't the end of the criteria. If the accuracy of information is verifiable through the referenced reliable sources, why should anyone care whether that information is "notable" or not?

Wikipedia's definition of "notable" is simply "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". There isn't a lot of daylight between "notability" and "verifiability".

Then Wikipedia should get rid of "notability" as a criterion and simply insist on verifiable coverage in reliable sources.

I'm curious, what article was deleted that you can cite as an example of destruction of knowledge?

edit: it's a serious question! Instead of down voting, just tell me. Or even downvote, but at least tell me.

Deletionpedia is no longer kept up but I used to enjoy browsing it to see what was deleted .

http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php

Some observations from looking through these:

* Huge amounts of various fictional universe lore, similar to the article

* quite a few bands

* some percentage of articles exists again, with better content

The discussion over deleting "Boomerang Engineer" is kind of funny. "totally improbable specialization. Throw it away (and hope it doesn't return):"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

A couple of local (or internet-local) bands. One BBC documentary about a particular subculture that I was interested in at the time. One (fairly obscure, but involving some minor technical firsts) video game.

All pop-cultural ephemera perhaps, but the sort of thing that qualifies as knowledge in my book.

It's the main subject of the article. There are currently 721 pokemons, but less than 40 of them have an article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Pok%C3%A9mon_director...

Also note that I didn't say destruction of knowledge, but destruction of value(data), which is a very different thing. I don't need to care about pokemons, or star trek episodes to understand that some people might be interested in documenting and organizing those. Maybe Wikipedia isn't the place. It doesn't mean the Wikimedia foundation could not provide an open solution.

And the full lists have info about all of them, just grouped in batches of 50. I don't think the pokemons are a good example of "lost content".

Try Wikidata.

Now Wikidata is cool.

https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page

Could you be very specific about what value in Wikipedia has been destroyed by deletionism? You're making an expansive claim: "so much" value it triggered a flight from the project. You should be able to cite specific articles to back it up.

Fortunately for you, there are detailed archives of most of the debates over deleted articles on Wikipedia.

Could you dredge up some examples?

The first thing I remembered was the deletion nomination spree that took down a bunch of programming language articles a couple years back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168). It took quite a bit of internet backlash for this to get noticed and reversed - something that probably wouldn't happen for lesser known articles. I can't cite any other examples off the top of my head, but I know I've run into dead bookmarks once in a while for obscure Linux/OSS related articles on Wikipedia. Though I guess it's debatable if those lost articles really had any worth.

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