Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The notability criteria specifically exclude mention-in-passing; there needs to be substantial coverage. That's not a goalpost move I just came up with; as always, these things are documented relentlessly on the project pages.

I'm not making a case against an article for "3Pac". Like I said, I probably would have been a "keep" on that AfD. I'm just saying it's not the borderline case you make it out to be.

If ABA is one of the top banks in Cambodia, you should have no trouble finding a reliable source that says that, and then rescue the page. There is a whole class of article that fails at AfD not because the subject isn't truly non-notable, but because the people who wrote the article did a poor job. That's a fixable problem; just go fix it, if you care.

View on HN

> I probably would have been a "keep" on that AfD

Probably keep, so it sounds like you thinks it's a borderline case.

> I'm just saying it's not the borderline case you make it out to be.

Wait, what?

I stopped fighting for articles like these years ago because I grew to despise arguing over Wikipedia's policies. There's power users who seem to delight in bureaucracy, but for me it just sucks all the enjoyment out of participating in Wikipedia.

That being said, I still make edits to articles sometimes.

Yeah, the second "borderline" is a typo, and should read "open-and-shut" or something. Sorry, message board comments are the log(1.1)th draft of history.

I also stopped contributing to Wikipedia. The places I would have written in are all related to my work, and I found it intensely frustrating to be edited and incorrected by people who knew less about my field but more about Wikipedia's rules. I can see why it's so off-putting! But it later occurred to me that that's as it should be: it's what the project is getting at when it talks about "No Original Research". Wikipedia is a tertiary source; it's a directory of other sources, a map of the available literature. I can't just go into Wikipedia and write how macOS Seatbelt works, because I am not myself a reliable source; I'd be a guidemark on the map pointing to nowhere.

Instead, what I should be doing (to the extent I care about improving the encyclopedia) is writing secondary sources that the encyclopedia can eventually cite. I'm not supposed to be writing on Wikipedia (at least, not in my areas of expertise); I'm supposed to be writing elsewhere.

I've seen that happen a few times, an expert in a field will greatly improve an article, only to have their additions removed or butchered by someone who's far less educated on the subject. The resulting edit war is "won" by the person better versed in Wikipedia's policies, and that's usually not the expert.

The bureaucrat wins, the article gets neutered, and the expert gets so frustrated they never participate in Wikipedia again. To me, it seems like Wikipedia loses more than it gains in this.

And my point is: it's not. The phenomenon you're describing is in fact healthy. Subject matter experts should in fact not cite their own authority when writing in an encyclopedia. They're almost certainly right, whatever they're writing, but that's not the point.

How is that healthy? And what is the point?

I understand the "no original research" policy, there needs to be verifiable sources. What I don't get is the tendency to discourage experts from writing about the subjects they know the best. I'd much rather have someone who is "almost certainly right" have the final say on an article.

Of course, verifying that someone actually is an authority would be a huge ordeal in itself...

The discouragement experts get on Wikipedia is being forced to cite --- to Wikipedia's standards --- points that they would not need to cite in their own writing. They're used to writing for their peers, with much of what they have to say being accepted common knowledge. That doesn't work on WP, at least not under scrutiny. For an expert, writing on WP is much more tedious than writing anywhere else. A Wikipedia editor goes in expecting the exercise to be about organizing citations; a subject matter expert goes in expecting the exercise to be about (say) science communication. The subject matter expert should write articles that WP cites, not WP pages.

What I think people miss in these arguments is that Wikipedia is about the citations. It's a directory of sources. If it says something important, that thing needs to be footnoted to something readers can go find and read directly. That is the point.

Lots of people see other things Wikipedia could be about. They're not wrong: it could be about those things. But it's not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...

I don't have an example handy, but I disagree that Wikipedia is about the citations. It _should_ be about the citations, but I often come across pages (usually medical/health related) that have citations where the Wikipedia page says something completely different from the source that is cited.

If Wikipedia were about the citations, I would expect to see a larger effort in verifying that page content reflects what the source says.

They fall short of their goals all the time. I'm just saying: (1) they're clear about what their goals are, and (2) they're sensible goals. And, it's hard to argue with a project as successful a sthis.

“coverage”

do you mean like on TV or something? no one watches that

Reply on news.ycombinator.com