Comment by quant18 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quant18 | Hacker News Reader

Why Kenya's first Internet meme wasn't notable enough for Wikipedia ... On March 24, the Wall Street Journal’s Cassandra Vinograd commented on the story ... The article was deleted once again

Actually in the end, it was notable enough for Wikipedia. The article was not deleted again following the initial speedy deletions for copyright violation and the like. It was nominated for a full deletion discussion, but every single person other than the nominator voted "keep" [1]. Furthermore, the nominator (the guy who initiated the full debate) isn't exactly a model Wikipedian; he had been registered for less than half a year, and left in a huff just two months later after administrators told him to be more patient with some guy who had added unsourced names to a soccer roster article [2][3].

But it is doubtful whether Internet access alone will make people in developing countries contribute to Wikipedia ... As those from developing countries come online and try to edit the encyclopedia, a number of conflicts have arisen due to tensions between so-called ‘inclusionists’ and ‘deletionists’ in the encyclopaedia ... the homophily of the current network is coming up against its need to expand and diversify

Incidentally, one of the users who proposed the Makmende article for deletion (one of the other times, not the main debate above) is himself from a developing country [4]. And he's contributed to Wikipedia numerous articles about his home country (as well as others about Swedish, Taiwan, and Russian chemists) [5].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Woogee

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_not...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Makmende&actio...

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Salih

I think your answer is an exemplar of the problems the Wikipedia community faces.

Insiders are satisfied that the process, honed over a decade, is working. At a micro level there is nothing to point to that is actually wrong; indeed you could argue the process is growing in sophistication and fairness.

Outsiders are often very dissatisfied. From their perspective, new contributions are assailed with objections from people who appear to be proudly ignorant of the subject in question, and their work is subjected to bewildering bureaucratic procedures. And this is reflected in the macro statistics for contributors, which for the English Wikipedia are all flat or even going in reverse.[1]

I think Wiki-insiders have become a bit disconnected from the experience of outsiders, especially when it comes to social norms. To an insider, squabbles about notability and even requests for deletion are normal. Insiders are so used to this, they avoid being vulnerable to the criticisms of other Wikipedians, by reflex; for instance, in footnoting everything they say. ;) Imagine for a minute that you walked into a passionate notability discussion without such habits already ingrained. How do you think it would go?

The article strongly implies that there is a Global North/Global South problem here. So your point about how the core 'homophily' group aren't necessarily from Europe or America is interesting. Perhaps the real axis is Wikipedian/Non-wikipedian.

[1] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_users#Growth_in...

This is hardly a problem unique to Wikipedia, and no especially workable solutions have been proposed that I’ve seen. If routine members are denied the ability to do things like bring up deletion discussions, just because some of them might get tendentiously caught up in the bureaucracy and thereby lose sight of broader goals, that just makes the process more onerous when it is necessary, which is often.

I think the biggest problem is that the “outsiders” you are generalizing about, at least in your portrayal, are failing to realize that the “insiders” are just a bunch of individual people, and don’t stand for any unified position, conspiratorial or otherwise.

Communicating information to new users, especially ones who make little effort to learn about community norms and practices, is extremely difficult, because there is no way to force them to look at any particular explanation. Even talk page messages lovingly crafted to be as helpful as possible are going to often meet with “What, I have to spend more than 30 seconds figuring out why my changes to an article were deemed a regression? No thanks.”

Communicating information to new users, especially ones who make little effort to learn about community norms and practices, is extremely difficult, because there is no way to force them to look at any particular explanation.

Karma systems deal with this by using game dynamics. Beginners are channeled into work which supposedly educates them and indoctrinates than into community values.

I think there’s a big difference between a site whose visible product is discussion, such as Hacker News, and a site whose discussion is only in support of the visible product, like Wikipedia. Newcomers to a discussion community can easily see practices and norms at work, because the process and the results are the same thing, and are completely transparent by definition. Since much if not most of the process of writing Wikipedia is reorganizing and rewriting and cutting and polishing, without any one user having responsibility for an article, it’s not obvious just quite what contributions are most helpful, or even helpful at all.

I think the feedback (reversions with edit summaries, discussion on talk pages, comments on users’ pages) are okay, but it’s an inherently different kind of feedback than you’d get from, say, HN or Facebook or Twitter or Stack Overflow. Just comes with the territory.

I think Wikipedia could do a lot better, especially if it had more programmers working on technical improvements. But I wouldn’t guess the systems used by discussion-oriented communities could be usefully easily transferred.

the systems used by discussion-oriented communities could be usefully easily transferred.

The specific mechanisms would have to be different, but the underlying economics would be the same.

Imagine for a minute that you walked into a passionate notability discussion without such habits already ingrained. How do you think it would go?

Are you suggesting that Wikipedia is like a debate training ground, and that Wikipedian HN users are prone to citation?

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