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Comment by fredsted | Hacker News Reader

I'm not part of the Wikipedia community, but a thing I don't understand about wikipedia is the excessive deletionism. Plain text is not that expensive to host. Keeping this in mind, if an article is not vandalism, spam or nonsense what reasons are there to deleting it? If there is actually a vote happening to delete an article, why not just keep it: there are actually people who care enough to vote on it. I don't think that form of authoritarianism belongs on a website like Wikipedia. It's very demoralising for new users seeing the article they care about and spent time on getting deleted by a single click from an administrator. Even administrators quit after working on Wikipedia for years due t frustration with deletionism and similar issues. In my opinion, "too much" information wins by default. Before wikipedia is "all information" and not "information others find notable", there's still work to do.

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Hosting cost is the very least of the concerns.

One important one is impact. Most people treat Wikipedia content as "probably true", so any time where the truth of something matters, zero content is better than bad content. That's true for all sorts of scientific, medical, and commercial content.

Another is impact on living people. The folks who wrangle the rules for biographies of people still alive [1] have put a lot of thought into recognizing the impact that Wikipedia articles can have on people. Having nothing is often better than having a bad article.

A third is self-promotion and vanity. People are willing to write endlessly about themselves. Bands formed by teens in their garages, companies trying to promote themselves, blatant spam, subtle commercial manipulation: Wikipedia doesn't need that.

A fourth is maintainability. The number of active Wikipedia editors is modest. Some sorts of content attract new editors. But quite a lot won't. I think it's often better for Wikipedia to have no article than a bad article that isn't going to get better soon.

And that points toward a fifth thing: the value of the Wikipedia brand. Wikipedia won the reference race because of its quality. It is enormously valuable for the world to have a single, high-quality factual resource. The brand should be maintained. People can (and certainly do) disagree on where to draw the line between crap and not-crap. But almost nobody disagrees that there is quite a lot of non-encyclopedic material (e.g., [2], [3]), and that the Internet is plenty big enough to host that somewhere other than Wikipedia.

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

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_d...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not

I think you're absolutely right on impact and self-promotion, but I don't think Wikipedia's brand is about quality. Or at least, not primarily about quality.

>Wikipedia won the reference race because of its quality.

Weren't convenience and quantity important factors and more important ones? To me the value of Wikipedia is that virtually any topic is discussed reasonably consistently with reasonable quality. If I specifically need quality, I'll look to the article's sources or find my own.

When you think about "quality" on Wikipedia, don't just think about any given article in isolation, but instead step back and look at the bigger picture: for instance, how every Wikipedia article about a movie has a similar structure, or how easy it is to hop from one species in Hymenoptera to the next. You also have to look at the things that aren't there to appreciate the degree of work that goes into making the project coherent.

Another instructive place to start reading about WP quality is the Featured Article process; in particular, try clicking into some of the discussions about individual FA candidates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles

Depends on what you consider the competition.

Compared with whatever Google coughs up, I think its big win is quality. Other Google links are equally convenient, but Wikipedia is trustworthy. And the big Wikipedia controversies have mainly been about quality failures, so I think that's most significant to readers in terms of maintaining brand value.

I agree that the necessary level of quality here is only "reasonable quality" rather than perfection. And I agree that other factors definitely helped.

Before you form a strong opinion about "deletionism", it's a good idea to skim a few days worth of AfD discussions (AfD is the most important step in the process of community-deleting an article on WP).

Here's yesterday's:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

What logs like this tell me is that if "deletionism" is really a force on Wikipedia, it has a clear cause. Note the sheer volume of marginal (or sub-marginal) articles WP is dealing with, and also the degree of attention each one of them gets. Click through to the article on "Samarqand Restaurant", and then back to the AfD debate, and note that WP people actually find reasons to stick up for it.

Wikipedia isn't geocities. It's not there to give people a voice or let them write about whatever they want. The point is to keep the aggregate quality high enough that people trust it as a resource and are willing to contribute high-quality material. That means culling a whole lot of crap.

I've participated in a large number of AfD discussions, and the vast majority of the articles that get deleted simply didn't belong there in the first place.

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