Comment by The_Colonel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by The_Colonel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Most of those mentioned issues are quite minor - some of them (like talk pages containing copy pasted content) seem actually like non-issues.

Or the category thing - yes, it has circular references which breaks the nice theory behind it, but what practical issues to the readers or editors does this present?

The syntax is messy, yes and it's a problem. But converting it to a markdown/HTML is downright absurd. I think the current approach of improving it step by step is the most reasonable. Wikipedia is a project which can afford to sustain its own custom syntax (because of history, compatibility concerns and wikipedia's special needs).

I think the biggest issue isn't technical in nature - it's the actual task of building the encyclopedia - to decide together on its scope, decide what is notable and what isn't. To fight against brigading from interest groups, fight against attempts to game their rules. All of these are intrinsically difficult tasks and of course wikipedia has made many mistakes. But even then it still fares pretty well in my book.

Well said.

Difficulties are what they are. Part of why things are difficult is because perfect, mechanical solutions aren't feasible. If they were, the problem would be solveable, commoditized and something else would be difficult instead.

This article does a good job presenting difficulties, and they are all important areas where doing a good job is important.

Eg "Or the category thing - yes, it has circular references which breaks the nice theory behind it, but what practical issues to the readers or editors does this present?"

There probably isn't a good, legible solution that will "fix" this. It's an epistemological problem about knowledge itself. Wikipedia's approach is an approach. It isn't perfect because there are no perfect solutions to knowledge problems. It is however, a workable approach given the problem space.

None of these need 100% solutions. They just need workable solutions.

> decide what is notable and what isn't.

I feel like Wikipedia (at least English Wikipedia) has long past this, and pretty much keep everything that has even the slightest of notability.

And I have no issue with it. I see this as one of the (big) advantage of Wikipedia over traditional encyclopedia.

(Don't get me wrong, I knew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability still exists.)

> ... and pretty much keep everything that has even the slightest of notability.

Wikipedia keeps deleting plenty of pages. There's a lot of self promo, a lot of pages about not sufficiently notable topics etc. You could think that e.g. mayor of your local 5K town will have "slightest notability". Well if that's their only claim to fame, then their nice Wikipedia page is going to be deleted.

> And I have no issue with it. I see this as one of the (big) advantage of Wikipedia over traditional encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is not limited by the physical constraints, but other limits are still present - e.g. the ability to check the validity of claims of the original article and subsequent edits is limited by the available manpower.

You're right, biography is definitely a tricky one.

When I was replying I was thinking of some common "complaints" about Wikipedia like "why the hell we need an article for every single team's 1928 season in 3rd tier Polish football" etc.

My impression is that there are still a lot of deletionist editors floating around but I can't prove it. (And some cherry-picked examples in the OP don't really prove anything.)

Like you, I have no issue with most articles at some level of verifiability sticking around. Most things are notable to some degree if you get local enough (whether geo, field of interest, etc.).

I wouldn’t be so sure. I tried to add a page for a newly released album by a band that has a sizable Wikipedia page, and within an hour it had been deleted and all of the associated link changes to update footers/etc had been reverted as well. I reopened it and added more (read: useless, unnecessary) content, and after a month in the review queue it got accepted.

Adding a new page is harder than ever, because of WP:N.

Well, there's the selection/survivorship bias there: You only see what was deemed notable. The stuff that wasn't isn't there for you to see.

(Unless you specifically go looking for it, in discussions about what was deleted or whatever.)

You would be surprised how many profiles are attempted to be deleted or vandalised during election periods in the US and the UK.

That's more vandalism than being about deletions though. But it dovetails with something else. Can you really argue someone running for public office, at least with a major party, isn't notable at some level? Even if it's Register of Probate in some rural county?

Arguing semantics is futile unless it's in the context of linguistics.

The bit about all the deletions seems to me the most relevant/important criticism in the piece. But, even as someone who is much more inclusionist than deletionist, it's a hard problem. The rules don't really help except at the extremes. And notability, as you suggest, is very context and scope dependent.

I have peers in my field, executives at major companies, journalists who have bylines pretty much every days, book authors, etc. who are quite well known in the context of my field or at least a subset of it and are easy to verify--but I'm guessing that many articles about those subjects would be somewhat arbitrarily deleted for lack of notability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com