Wikipedia, Notability, and Open Source Software | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia, Notability, and Open Source Software

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41 pointssamd26 comments

Apparently Wikipedia's policy on "canvassing" forbids anyone from soliciting "outside" supporters to join discussions you care about.

One of Wikipedia’s favourite guidelines is the one on canvassing. You see, if an article you’re interested comes up for deletion, it’s not permissible to contact outside sources that may know more about the topic, because they are likely biased. Canvassing will often get you a severe warning, or banned. Linus’s law states that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” On the other hand, Wikipedia’s collective belief is that bringing new people with new perspective to something is a heinous offence… After all, it might upset their precious status quo.

Please go read the policy here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing

The incumbent editors' transparent effort to quell dissent is appalling.

It's consistent with the (IMO misguided) philosophy that merely caring about a topic constitutes a conflict of interest and thus experts or other interested parties shouldn't participate. It's probably also a pragmatic (over-) reaction to the constant gaming of virtually all Internet polls.

I would not mind as much if the policy read like it was intended to prevent ballot stuffing. Instead, it reads like an elitist minority realizing that they are outnumbered and setting up barriers to the participation of opposing viewpoints.

It's far more likely that a group of well-meaning people who initially set out to protect Wikipedia from the influence of various elitist minorities have failed to realise that they have become one themselves. Beware of true believers -- there will always be a crusade in the offing eventually.

Wikipedia's deletionist policies scream opportunities for wiki with specialist coverage.

As an example, the open source gaming encyclopedia wiki I founded and built was a partial result of wikipedia's deletionist attitude toward obscure open video games.

What it ultimately led to, is the colonization of niches wikipedia refuse to cover in-depth. This may be a good thing, as dedicated community grows up to make niche encyclopedia much more in depth and more useful than what would otherwise be at Wikipedia.

To some extent, that's the Wikia model. (To the extent some deleted topics eventually wind up in Wikia wikis, aggressive deletionism may make money for Wikia.)

I have a counter-point. 3 years ago I was using SDCC C compiler [1] for a 8051-compatible microcontroller. I checked Wikipedia for some background and found that SDCC article [2] was deleted.

[1]: http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Device_C_Compiler

And you know what? Deletion is not the end of the world. I just re-created the article from scratch and after 3 years it's still there! Here's what I wrote in the talk page:

= Why re-creating the article =

I know this article has been deleted before. But I believe there are strong reasons to recreate it:

* Small Device C Compiler is included in Debian starting from 2002, and FreeBSD starting from 2004.

* It has good statistics on SourceForge (highest rank is 41 at Aug 2006, stable 6000 downloads per month).

* It is mentioned in 5 books according to Google Books, and has about 70 hits on Google Scholar.

* It is the only open source C compiler for popular Microchip PIC16 and 8051 microcontrollers.

And a final note: I am recreating the article from scratch.

This article is extreme; but the points it raises are a major problem for Wikipedia.

I used to be a fairly regular editor but one day realised I was spending 60% of my edits on argument and pointless meta (mostly trying to help defend field experts with not much wiki experience from the idiots).

There is a broad amount of sanity on Wikipedia but there are very very vocal areas that are causing problems.

The sloppy adherence to the notability guidelines has pissed me off so much in the past that I've entirely written off even bothering to contribute to wikipedia anymore. I've posted pages on people, software, projects and the like that met or exceeded the guidelines and had all but 1 or 2 deleted within a day or so and spent literally months on getting a few deletions reversed until I finally just threw in the towel.

I'm constantly surprised at the things that wikipedia doesn't have in it more than what it does. And I'd wager that there were pages on those subjects in the past and they've simply been deleted.

In other cases, subjects that I've referred to on occasion over the years have seen their article content slowly diminished over time to be practically useless. Things like screenshots being taken down, history or explanations being gutted, external links disappearing. It's all becoming basically useless on many levels.

I used to start research at wikipedia to get good pointers to sites, now I pretty much just google and hit next page a few times to get past the SEO spam.

While dwm probably does deserve to have a wiki page.. most pages do not..

If every OSS project, anime character, street gets its own page, the whole thing will grow too large for any group of people to effectively maintain..

The deletionists are also probably the people who end up deleting spam, prank edits, etc .. which is a pretty thankless job with no end in sight, and I can understand their sentiment, when they advocate for a smaller but higher quality wikipedia.

I donated to Wikimedia in past years. I shant be doing so again. It's not that this particular article is something I care about, but I'm not going to use my money to support something that's increasingly working against the spread of human knowledge.

Hey hey. I was a Wikipedia admin for a year or two (until focus shifted elsewhere). If there are any guidelines that you'd like clarification on, I'll do my best.

Can you explain why posting a notification to a partisan group about a deletion is considered canvasing? It seems like saying "if there is an issue involving schools, you can't tell the parents of school kids." Am I just reading that wrong? (Just so we're clear, I'm not attacking you. I can see how someone might take it that way so I wanted to clarify before we even go down that road.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing

I don't really see anything in WP:CANVAS that would frown on informing a specific subgroup. If anyone's capable of demonstrating notability, it's likely to be those who are most familiar with the subject at hand, yeah? I'd actually encourage going directly to the associated community and asking for assistance in determining notability.

That being said, evidence does need to be put forth that meets WP:NOTE: "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article." There are many subsections and clarifications, but that's really the core of it.

My experience in notability largely revolves around webcomics. There's a very low bar for entry and a fair amount of pride in one's creation, which I can well understand. However, things started getting to the point where an article was being created for each and every webcomic out there. In some cases, the fan community was quite helpful in demonstrating notability: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

If you disagree with notion of notability in general, we can discuss that separately (so long as you put forth an argument that my cat McMuttonchops can have an article in Wikipedia).

The way that graph reads if you inform a partisan audience about an article for deletion, it's considered canvasing and you can be baned as a result. And given that the discussion of deletion for the dwm article was closed because of discussions here and other places, it just appears that that is exactly what happened.

With apologies to Bismarck, Wikipedia is like a sausage - it's better not to see it being made.

I agree that it's a mistake that Wikipedia is deleting these articles, free software is probably taking the brunt of it because there are no print magazines for software (or very few compared to professions that existed before).

Overall, the deletionism hasn't seemed to slow the growth of Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%2...

Although I would like to see more recent stats on their deletion rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Emijrp/Deleting

And the result is that a lot of experts go and make their own wikis, because they can't merge their content into Wikipedia. Which kind of defeats the whole centralisation advantage of Wikipedia.

Perhaps someone should start a new Wiki that can be overlain on Wikipedia. Then all the deleted content could be kept, but we would still be able to access all the information via one site.

Deletionism is a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.

But what can we radical inclusionists do in the meantime?

The articles that do survive deletionism are useful, and important. Wikipedia remains a cultural treasure. So, the proper response to deletionism is not to boycott or withdraw from Wikipedia, but offer qualified support of the common base, all the while preparing for the eventual, inevitable, glorious inclusionist fork.

More of my reasoning here: http://memesteading.com/2010/03/15/dialectical-inclusionism/

This fork could be, articles as they appear it Wikipedia, plus other articles that weren't accepted. However, what about deletionists affecting the edits of existing articles? Swiping Wikipedia's history, and keeping your articles in line with that would be a serious pain.

Wikipedia could easily set a flag that says how core the article is and then users could select the level of inclusion or notoriety they want to see. It'd also be awesome if on every page they included some sort of visualization of editing activity & population of editors and the amount of viewers who have looked at the article in relation to the edits. This way a user can get a feeling of how many eyeballs have been on the page.

This should supposedly be active by now: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/wikitrust/ from a quick look I can't figure out how to turn it on.

Trying to run a site that's exactly Wikipedia/MediaWiki, but inclusive, could be hard -- given the preexistence of Wikipedia, and the difficulties of attracting a critical mass to an almost-the-same project. Such a simple fork might be stuck as a sickly sibling for a long time.

Instead, I believe the inclusionist alternative will have to change some of the core dynamics of Wikipedia -- solving some of the tensions that have motivated deletionism in other ways, while creating out a distinct competitive identity. I have some ideas, which I'll be writing more about soon. But a major theme is: there's plenty of room at the bottom.

How far does radical inclusionism go? I mean, you don't want to see every document on the web migrated to wikipedia, do you? What belongs there?

To a large extent Wikipedia serves as reference/summarization -- lossy 'compression' of a sort -- for source materials. So my tentative standard would be: is a significantly shorter version of the source material still true and useful? If so, it's legitimate for inclusion in my hypothetical everything-is-on-topic Wikipedia offshoot.

(Compare this idea to the theory behind the 'Hutter Prize' -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize -- that advances in compressing Wikipedia imply progress in artificial intelligence.)

You even potentially want many articles per topic, based on the reader's patience (or initial level of competence). The 1-sentence version for the casual reader in a hurry. The 1-minute version. The 10-minutes version. The 1-hour version for a keenly-interested researcher who already knows adjacent topics well. (If these already exist elsewhere, include them by reference, but build out the open encyclopedia with them as needed to fill gaps in the coverage or quality of other sources.)

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