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Comment by powera | Hacker News Reader

It wouldn't be entirely unfair to say that Wikipedia's policies are designed to keep people like Mr. Gioia off the site and out of the decision making process.

Considering that he doesn't want to learn what Wikipedia's policies are, or why they exist (and his calling people who disagree with him "trolls"), I am inclined to think that is a good thing.

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Getting huffy about Mr. Gioia's choice of language doesn't really engage with the substance of his complaint. Is there a stated Wikipedia policy that composers must have an entry in the Grove Dictionary of Music to be considered notable? I bet there isn't. If Gioia is correct in saying that Wikipedia editors are insisting on that, then those Wikipedia editors are applying an arbitrary standard.

They are, in a word, trolling.

And I am inclined to think calling them out is a good thing.

He's not correct. One editor of six in the deletion discussion mentioned that they had checked multiple sources (including Grove) and Faulconer wasn't in them.

It would be about 99% unfair. In my experience Wikipedia style moderation setups are a magnet for small minded petty martinets. Of course rules and some criteria are needed, but soon those people run over any shred of common sense while wielding them.

Wow. I thought Wikipedia was supposed to be a public resource. I wasn't aware certain people were supposed to stay off the site.

I once tried to edit an article about a scientist who had developed a bit of surrounding controversy over his studies in parapsychology. Having no real knowledge of the debate, I didn't add or remove any information; I just felt the introduction had been written in an overtly non-neutral way by a past editor. So, I removed a couple of words like "hoax" and trimmed one or two sentences so that they didn't come off as a character assassination (they had contained unsourced editorializations). Specifics aside, the article had explicitly violated Wikipedia's policies on using NPOV language.

My edits were reverted within 24 hours, and the talk page was updated with an admonition to my IP address (I'd posted without logging in) claiming I'd been implicated in "unsavory" activities that could be found by Googling the IP (it was a dynamic IP, but of course I tried and found nothing) and making vague threats that I should not attempt such edits again. That's the last time I edited anything on Wikipedia.

That's editing. I mean, I can understand that certain people might not be great at editing.

But I'm shocked that they would say there are people they don't even want on the site.

I can't tell if you're suggesting that my edits were simply bad, and typically I would accept that is a possibility; but, even then, it was the fact that I was threatened essentially with being swatted. There was no feedback on the edits that I made. Just unfounded assertions that my IP address was involved in something "unsavory" and that I would face severe consequences if I continued such edits. It made me feel very unwelcome and I assume many other people have the same experience on Wikipedia.

I realize the futility of trying to convince you that my edits were warranted, I guess. The article has since been updated, however, and the non-neutral tone that I'd tried to fix has been removed, so apparently somebody else ultimately did succeed.

There are many things to discuss about that, first were your edits correct, secondly how can you make such edits and be accepted on Wikipedia. It doesn't seem like you care about reflecting why you failed at the second one.

I guess that is a field of research how does Wikipedia handle anon edits. I have done thousands of anon edits on Wikipedia and have very low deletion rate, but I guess I kept away from tone and opinion.

Regarding the topic of making edits that would be accepted, I assume it was subject matter that rubbed someone the wrong way because as I said it was basically a character assassination of the article's subject. I strongly suspect the writer of the original non-neutral content had a browser extension or bot monitoring the page for any edits. I reflected on it quite a bit (I'm not sure how you concluded I've no interest in that), but I just think it creates a bit of an issue with the community being unwelcoming to newcomers. On the receiving end of it there's not really any way to know why someone decided to make unfounded accusations against you in a public place without engaging them further, which seemed unwise to me.

I agree with you that it looks like a good field for some research, I don't know how the issue of anonymous edits could be handled to productively stamp out abusive edit behavior.

Wait a minute. I wasn’t questioning your editing at all. I was only pointing out that this guy is openly admitting not only that he doesn’t want some people editing, but that he doesn’t even want some people to have access to Wikipedia. That’s truly shocking to me.

I get you. I'm sorry that I got a bit defensive, and I didn't mean to detract from your point.

Sorry, but I think that composer is relevant. So this is not about knowing policy, it is about disagreement.

One of the reasons for the policies is so questions such as "should this person have an article" don't devolve into popularity polls.

I'm sorry, but "is this musician notable" literally is a popularity contest.

I was about to post this.

Two different objections.

First, while the most written-about musicians are also generally the most popular, there isn't a strict correlation.

Second, there is a vast difference between a decision-process of "if the sources provided show that this person is popular, they are notable" and "if three of the four Wikipedia editors surveyed like this person's music, they are notable".

1. You are both correct and incorrect. The most well written about musicians are the most popular by definition within the group of people who write about musicians. A) This does not mean that those musicians are popular within some sizeable portion of the general population. B) The preferences of the people writing about musicians (that wikipedia will accept as a source) are not guaranteed to be representative of the population at large, in fact I'd wager that essentially guaranteed to be not true at different points in time and for different genres.

Wikipedia is choosing to conflate the popularity of an artist amongst the writing group and the popularity in the broader public. And when the two groups disagree, they are choosing to go with those who write rather than with the broader public.

2. This isn't about "the sources provided shot that he's popular", it's do we acknowledge that their contribution is defined as popular. Dragon Ball Z is/was an incredibly popular and influential anime.

I guess all it takes now is for someone at WIRED who loved Dragon Ball Z to publish an article or two about them and they suddenly become notable.

but that's not how Wikipedia works. their policies don't care how popular or well-known someone or something is, what matters is whether or not journalists, news outlets, and other such groups (who must themselves be "notable") find them "notable" enough to cover. the Philip Roth story mentioned in the article is one such example of this—it's a good thing Mr. Roth worked at The New Yorker (a verified "notable" news outlet) so he could set the record straight about his own article, otherwise he would've been shit outta luck!

it's really odd the degree to which Wikipedia's policies enshrine commercial journalism outlets as the Arbiters of Notability.

>it's really odd the degree to which Wikipedia's policies enshrine commercial journalism outlets as the Arbiters of Notability.

It is somewhat of an irony that notability probably is bolstered more by fairly small run periodicals and books than it is by things like fan websites.

Except they do care how popular the musician is. It's just that instead of setting the threshold themselves they choose to pass the buck and defer to journalists and other groups.

exactly. this also leads to e.g. "Controversy" sections of articles with sentences that make uncharitable statements about people or groups, sometimes outstripping the rest of the article in terms of length, and ending with [11][12][13][14][17][24][27] so you know it's a super accurate true statement instead of politically- and/or ideologically-slanted analysis from multiple sources (potentially all referencing a single source themselves) that "just so happen" to be completely identical. it doesn't matter that if it was something that happened years ago that's wholly irrelevant now and everyone's long forgotten about it—if a Sufficient Quantity of Journalists said that the thing was notably controversial at the time, well, it's notably controversial forever!

it seems like I encounter more and more of this exact thing all over Wikipedia as time marches on.

Yes, I am very familiar with that phenomenon.

Not exactly. A musician who is very popular but for whom there is not significant coverage in reliable independent sources would likely not meet the notability requirements.

If the policy is “you must feature in Grove’s”, Wikipedia becomes even more derivative than it already is.

As it was always intended be. Secondary sources only, no original research.

> It wouldn't be entirely unfair to say that Wikipedia's policies are designed to keep people like Mr. Gioia off the site and out of the decision making process.

Why? Who is he and what has he done that might make Wikipedia dislike him?

Ted Gioia is a prolific author on jazz musicology and history; I have several of his books and find them to be informative and entertaining.

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