Mark it “bleh” or something, but don’t delete. Nobody prints out Wikipedia anyway.
Call it "knowledge debt", similar to the concept of "code debt". Every piece of knowledge also has to be maintained (e.g. in the case of a natural person, if they are still alive), and that maintenance costs effort.
Vs. just labeling the page as old, low-traffic, and little-maintained. Disk space is cheap, and the "backwater" page's information might become more important with time. (If only as a snippet of "what did people back then think about..." data.)
Having unmaintained articles means a huge amount of content not checked by anybody ever so what you get is a mix of self-promo, jokes, intentionally misleading articles, "1054654789764 is a number" articles, political agenda etc.
Editorial-resource-wise, there is a huge difference between:
- "a decent general editor can glance over this article long enough to label it as [1] plausibly legit, [2] obvious drunken rambling, [3] some kid's knock-knock joke collection, [4] ax-grinding extremism, [5] etc."
and
- "a subject-matter-expert editor can determine whether this Korean-language article about Roman legal practices in (the Roman province of) Hispania Baetica under Emperor Caracalla (198-217) is passably correct and current".
I am not a studious follower of things Wiki, but quite a few people seem to feel that Wikipedia is really not handling the situation well at all.
But it's very easy to write an article which superficially looks great - nice structure, polished language, links to other wikipedia articles etc, but at the same time can be completely false and talking about something which doesn't actually exist, or does exist and paints it in a completely incorrect light.
Again, not all such articles get caught today, but in general it's a manageable problem with the "Notability" and "Reliable sources" tools. Either there are supporting sources and you can easily verify the information, or there aren't, and you delete the article.
Now imagine that you relax these requirements and somebody writes that beautiful article full of details but with no supporting sources. It can be completely false, an elaborate hoax, self promo or part of a smear campaign. What do you do?
> but quite a few people seem to feel that Wikipedia is really not handling the situation well at all.
Yeah, they mostly have only very cursory information about what are wikipedia's goals and how it works internally.
At least Wikimedia could hire generalist experts for the major areas of science for each major language that have the time to review contested or suspicious articles, based on the cited sources or actual research. Many governments have such a public service for the members of parliament (e.g. the "Wissenschaftlicher Dienst des Bundestags" in Germany, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wissenschaftliche_Dienste_des_...), which every MP can ask to provide guidance on any question they need for their work.
See e.g. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/10/05/a-victory-for-free-kno... where they explicitly say, "the plaintiff argued that the Foundation should be treated like a traditional offline publisher and held responsible as though it were vetting all posts made to the sites it hosts, despite the fact that it does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects." (My emphasis.)
(By the way, for an alternative view of that specific case, see –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... as well as
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgpnq/wikipedia-and-google-... )
Liability is one consideration here. It is not uncommon for people to be libelled on Wikipedia, but the Wikimedia Foundation, as a platform, is protected from liability under Section 230. So they really have no interest in doing something that will result in their being held responsible for Wikipedia content – such as hiring experts to vet and correct said content. It will never happen: they are and want to remain a platform.
"After a half-decade, massive Wikipedia hoax finally exposed" https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/wikipedia-bicholim-conflict...
There are a few more examples here:
https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Farrow
Dr. William Henry Farrow (20 June 1805? – 17 November 1876) was a physician born and trained in England. Farrow practiced in Montreal, Quebec and Toronto, Ontario. He is most notable for providing one of the first detailed descriptions of synesthesia.[1] Farrow reported the details of the illness, (in this case temporary) in an article published in the Lower Canada Journal of Medicine.[2]
Footnotes
1. New, Chester (1929). Lord Durham. Oxford University Press. pp. 374–376.
2. "An Analysis of Confusion Occurring between the Senses". The Lower Canada Journal of Medicine. The Medical Society of Lower Canada. 12: 56–62. September 1838.
It's always worth remembering that Wikipedia has different sorts of quality problems from conventional encyclopedias.
Wikipedia's goal is to be an accessible comprehensive encyclopedia.
Do you disagree about the purpose of an encyclopedia? There's clearly space with web media to include more comprehensive articles, but IMO this should be _as well_.
It's kinda the "if I had more time I'd have written more briefly" concept writ large (at web scale, if you will).
Seems like it.
As another commenter wrote: “Encyclopedia is not supposed to be an introductory learning material, it's supposed to be a reference work.”
> but to me they're not encyclopedic as they're not really introductory.
Encyclopedia is not supposed to be an introductory learning material, it's supposed to be a reference work.
There's also a Wikimedia's project called Wikibooks which is aimed at producing learning material.
What old collections of books obsoleted in the early 80s are you referring to?
> to someone of moderate learning/intelligence.
It's mostly about the learning, not the intelligence, i.e. current state of research shows only loose correlation to intelligence (g factor) and favors models that use a domain-specific skill to explain maths competency. Intelligence will certainly help, but its effect is quite overvalued.
No it isn’t. It is an extreme claim that advanced mathematics can easily be explained to someone regardless of their intelligence.
The evidence for this claim would be the presence educational programs that can easily educate almost anyone in advanced mathematics.
These do not exist.
But a shallower explanation is the essence of what encyclopedias are all about, IMO.
I think that’s due to encyclopedias having been sets of books with limited space.
If you expect it to be a review of subjects, like an abstract -- as encyclopedias generally were before the advent of Wikipedia -- then it seems like something can be said on most notable topics.
It's a difficult task, it not only requires a thorough understanding of a subject but a special skill as an educator. It's a hard task.
Yes, it's going to be impossible for some articles, but if they're notable aspects of mathematics then it's worth a try.
I note that shelves are filled with books explaining complex topics at lower levels (easier in a book than a few paragraphs!?). Also, YouTube is replete with explanations that get closer to being encyclopedic than simply splurging graduate level textbook pages into a wiki (which is also a useful thing, but useful to different people).
To achieve accessible, Wikipedia accepts lower quality (arguably, often argued within itself), establishes methods to evaluate quality (with parenthetical comments, links to "sources," etc.).
I'm afraid these days I can't make out those goals over the shouting and shrieking of their actions.
If it was wrong when it was originally posted, then that should ideally have been worked out and corrected early on. If not, then it was a case of new information still being wrong, which is always a risk with a mass collaboration project like Wikipedia, regardless of how old each particular article is.
If the information is merely outdated, that's immediately discernible by looking at the age of the most recent edit.
In either case, the way a wiki works is to gradually accumulate improvements in accuracy, detail, and and thoroughness over time. Deleting content prevents this from happening.
> Deleting content prevents this from happening.
If somebody creates an article about their sock collection, they might be somewhat increasing detail and thoroughness, but possibly decreasing overall accuracy. Wikipedia might send a representative to verify this fact, but I'm not sure if the Wikipedia's budget would be sufficient for that. If not, then I think deleting would actually contribute to and not impair the overall goal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
Free Flights to Italy was a minor political party in the 2018 Italian elections. The party was created by Giuseppe Macario.
Rolling Stone Italy published an article on Macario showing that many of his claims about himself were actually fabricated. This was picked up by other media outlets.
La Voce di New York published several not-so-positive articles on the guy at the time. The Points Guy published an article as well.
The account (Modulato) which proposed the deletion is Giuseppe Macario himself. He did the same thing on Italian Wikipedia. It is a strategic attempt to suppress negative stories about his past. You can see this behavior repeated in the history of rogeting article on English Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rogeting&action=h...
Several years ago, Macario ran an academic cheating service called CheatTurnitin. One of the techniques used to circumvent anti-plagiarism services, like Turnitin, is rogeting.
Macario published an article on LinkedIn. He integrated the article as a source for the rogeting article (IP 5.170.* edits). A short while later, he added his service's website to the article as well.
This service attracted a lot of negative reviews on sites like Ripoff Reports. Toward the end of 2017, he attempted to clean up his additions (Adrin10) to the rogeting article. These were reverted by other editors.
Last year, he tried to propose the rogeting article for quick deletion. This was reverted by another editor. And that's when the Modulato account came in and removed the material without being contested.
While this content shouldn't have been there to start with, it just shows an example of not all deletionists being equal. Some are far worse than others.
Back when I was an active German Wikipedia editor, decisions were done by community vote.
Personally, I agree with you that the German inclusion policies are way too strict and there have been scandals about it (e.g. about an anti-feminine bias), but the Foundation "overruling" a community vote? That's a line that should not be crossed, for good reasons.