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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Every year something in my brain breaks and I think "I know, I'll finally get rsync.net a wikipedia entry".

This is somewhat important because the little-hitler that owns (yes, owns) the "cloud storage" wikipedia page refuses all additions of cloud storage providers that "aren't notable". So therefore, rsync.net has to have a wikipedia page.

This shouldn't be a problem - rsync.net has been mentioned in the press widely over the course of over 10 years - everything from articles about our warrant canary to articles about our ZFS support. In fact, other wikipedia pages mention and discuss rsync.net.

You know where this is going.

A perfectly well written article, well cited with 15+ citations from "respectable" journalist sources is nearly insta-deleted due to notability.

Every single time. I've tried 4-5 times over the past few years. Every time it's a different little-hitler that swoops in to bravely defend wikipedia.

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Add it to https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page

They started by forking wikipedia and have expanded the notability guidelines.

wow a wiki fork is amazing. its been needed for a while too.

It's also extremely unlikely to ever get enough traction to steal even a tiny fraction of wikipedia's user base.

Out of curiousity, have there been any other forks that have focused on editing the content? I mean, I know there's a bajillion wikipedia mirrors that are just trying to get page views for cheap, but have there been any other forks that are actually trying to bootstrap from Wikipedia and make changes to the underlying content?

As I sometimes mention, informally studying the effects of code structure on community creation is a bit of a long-running hobby of mine, and I'd be intrigued to see any other extant examples of a wikipedia fork.

The problem for forks is to get enough users to keep up with ongoing events. For example, according to Infogalactic, Leonard Cohen is still alive: https://infogalactic.com/info/Leonard_Cohen

The Chicago Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908: https://infogalactic.com/info/Chicago_Cubs

Without enough users, a snapshot of Wikipedia will quickly decay into unreliability. Most pages don't become inaccurate that fast, but you can't know if the page you're reading is one of them or not.

Surely a lower volume fork of wikipedia could somehow incorporate upstream changes in a more or less automated way? It seems like a site serious about doing this would work on some kind of moderated conflict resolution system for when it does happen, but the vast majority of pages would presumably not need it.

Yeah this seems like a great use of hg update nightly.

It's in the works. Forking something the size of wikipedia is a serious undertaking, not to mention the rickety pile of code it's built on. It's still early days.

This looks interesting, but I'm a bit iffy on a few things.

First of all is the perspectives filtering by relativity rating, which, while not yet implemented, is on the roadmap and seems to be an important future part of this encyclopedia. This idea seems to be an attempt to be more inclusive of people with various political views. This looks like a pretty big gamble to me, because it's not at all clear that this solution won't cause its own set of problems, or even work at solving the problem it purports to solve. The relativity ratings being on a one-dimensional political Left to political Right scale doesn't help my perspective on this, either.

There also seems to be some stuff about advertising in the info pages I read, which does not sound like a good thing. And the "Corelords" being corporate sponsors who oversee the editing of pages in their industry sounds pretty dangerous for an encyclopedia. But it's not clear how all this will work from what I've read, so it might be innocuous. Does anyone know more about this?

Then there are more cosmetic things, like the name being "Infogalactic", and the non-standard names for editors and admins, who are called "Galaxians" and "Starlords" respectively. These are harder to remember, and it's geeky in a sci-fi sort of way that's a bit off-putting to those of us who aren't big fans of sci-fi.

I do like that it's gamified a bit with a level system, though.

Anyone care to share their own perspective on this?

While their current focus does seem and probably should be on politics due to the wide reach of that topic, I think the idea of perspectives in general is a great idea for such an encyclopedia. The problem, in my view, that leads to the culture of deletionism at Wikipedia is the inability for one article to coherently explore all aspects and interpretations of a topic, so editors start deleting all but the parts they care about. Facts that are relevant to one perspective are not relevant to another. For example, Jesus-the-historical-figure is a different topic from Jesus-the-religous-figure.

I think the way Infogalactic solves the problem it is trying to solve is that people no longer have to argue if a particular fact is worth including in an article and have an edit war. It opens up a third option of recognizing that including or not depends on the circumstances of what the reader is looking for. I'm not sure what potential new problems you are thinking of.

As for corporate sponsors, they are bound by the same rules as the rest. I don't think explicitly recognizing corporate interest in the topic would be worse than trying to have an objective page which would probably be subverted anyway.

As for terminology, I don't see how "Infogalactic" as a name is more confusing to new users than "Wikipedia". Most people didn't know what "wiki" meant before Wikipedia. And I don't think new contributors would really have a problem figuring out "Galaxians" and "Starlords" with the obvious context.

That fork by Vox Day? I'm not sure I want to associate with that.

What was the name of the article you created? The deletion log shows nothing for "rsync.net". [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=...

I didn't find any evidence of Rsync in the Cloud Storage edit history, but there is evidence that Rsync was added to the Comparison of Online Backup Services article on November 11, 2015.

It was reverted less than an hour later with the comment "Thanks for the addition, but as wikipedia is not a directory, please limit the list to services with wikipedia articles." So it's at least plausible that he tried to create an article for Rsync.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_onl...

Edit: I initially thought you couldn't search for deletions older than a year. I was mistaken.

"Deletion records go back only a year"? Could you explain what you mean by this? Here, for instance, is an AfD log I cited several years ago on HN; it works fine, as I presume do all the AfD logs for every page deleted through the normal deletion process on WP:

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

My mistake, I tried using just a year in the search results and got older results, so I don't really know what the restrictions on the search are.

I wasn't able to bring up any pages from earlier than 12 months ago without putting in a specific year. I tried using Wikipedia pages that I have bookmarked in the past but no longer exist. I understood this to mean that I couldn't access older deletions, because of the following line on the page:

> Below is a list of recent deletions and restorations.

edit: Either way, it appears Rsync.net would be notable, as it appears on the Warrant Canary page as having the first commercial use of a Warrant Canary. That's the only current use I can find of Rsync.net. Internet cache pages are blocked where I work, so I can't find any more information.

Hold on. I'm not debating whether Rsync.net is notable. I'm saying that you confidently made a statement about Wikipedia that appears to be false --- and you did so while condemning other commenters here for holding an opinion contrary to your own.

I think you may be ascribing too much confidence and condemnation to my comment. I removed my inaccurate statement about the edit when I changed my comment, as I couldn't determine how to strikeout my text as I normally prefer, but my intention was not to make a definitive claim about the nature of Wikipedia, and I don't believe I worded my comment as such.

As far as I recall, my initial comment about how the deletion search worked was hedged by the phrase "it appears", (or something substantially similar). I provided evidence of what steps I had taken in my work. My joke about pitchforks was merely a joke, meant to point out how quickly users make up their mind one way or another.

I edited my initial comment to admit my error as soon as it was pointed out to me. Had I been acting maliciously, I would have just removed that section completely.

Regardless of what words I used to describe how Wikipedia works, the word I used in my assessment was "plausible", which I think is a very even-handed word. I specifically chose it because it doesn't make a strong claim either way.

You are reading a bit too far in to my comments if you think what I said was a definitive claim about how Wikipedia works, or an attack on other users.

Yes, it was "comparison of cloud storage blah blah" that we've tried, several times, to be added to, but again, "not notable" since we're only discussed in wikipedia, but don't have our own page.

But more to the point, as I have described, we have tried to add a rsync.net wikipedia several times (I'm sorry - I don't know the exact naming that "rsync.net" generates in a wikipedia URL) and as I described - almost instantaneously deleted due to notability - even with 12-15 serious, journalistic sources.

In order to look into this controversy, I searched for rsync.net on Wikipedia, and this is what I found. The user Kozubik submitted a draft with references, but the user Arthur Goes Shopping dismissed each of the references. Then when no one edited the draft for six months, the user JMHamo deleted it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Arthur_goes_shopping...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kozubik#Your_submiss...

Yes, that (2015) was the most recent attempt.

I have a locally saved copy of the submission and the references included a long form article at arstechnica, a long form print article in a magazine (Linux Format), The Yale Law Journal, theregister.co.uk, Lifehacker, ComputerWorld, EFF/Canarywatch, and more ... all over a 10+ year period.

Dismissed, flagged as not notable, and nothing to do but let the submission expire.

It's likely because of the conflict of interest rules which can go unmentioned in discussion threads

Get someone else with a mild level of Wikikarma to add the same content

Is that something you can escalate to someone higher-up in the Wikipedia chain of command (if such a thing exists)?

Theoretically he could exhaust the 3 revert rule with the delete-happy user (he creates it, guy deletes it 1, he puts it back 2, guy deletes it again 3), make a note on the talk page, and head to the edit war noticeboard where an admin can see it.

If you don't understand any of this, you see why WP is a bureaucratic pain in the arse.

It's 3 reverts in 24h, for what it's worth. You have to have a very trigger-happy editor.

First you need to spend months doing minor edits around wikipeida and participating in various social functions (like talk boards) in order to develop a reputation. Otherwise nothing you do will be taken seriously. Then you need to familiarize yourself with the all the nuances of the wikipedia internal policy guidelines both as written and as practiced, because you can be sure Mr. "This is my area, no one touches it without my permission" is an expert on all that.

Then and only then, will you have a shot at getting a change in that the tin pot dictator doesn't want. And you will need to be constantly vigilant that it doesn't disappear two weeks later.

I've never found it worth it to go through this idiotic process.

A very nice thing about Wikipedia is its obsessive tendency towards logging all this stuff. What's your Wikipedia username? We could look at some of the exchanges you had with more "reputable" contributors and get a sense of how valid this complaint is.

That's always what puts me off as well. It's turned into a bureaucratic mess – which is funny, considering that wikis were originally invented to be quick ways of collaborating with minimal effort and a low barrier to entry.

I can't find Rsync.net anywhere in the deletion logs, but one thing you might be able to remember is the username you used to add the article (or, really, to edit anything on Wikipedia). Could you give us that, and we can use it to track down the deleted article?

I would not be surprised to see that you had sufficient reliable sources to sustain an Rsync.net article, so it'd be interesting to see the logic used to speedy-delete your article.

One nice outcome of this would be that you'd end up with a functioning Wikipedia page. :)

In the meantime, add references and statements to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q27998978 (item about rsync.net)

You could always submit it to Infogalactic and see what happens.

They don't include your offering because it's success is not notable enough. Strangely, they do include a list of failures in another segment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_failures_in...

Maybe you need to go belly up then rebound with all your customers data. You'd be a "commercial failure" plus a "significant event." That might qualify for Wikipedia. Or just keep doing business as usual. ;)

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