Wikiwatch: Stirring The Pot
Posted October 25th, 2007 by Howard Tayler
I got an email message from a “Wikinewsie” named Brian a few days ago in which he asked me if I would help with the current Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser. I declined, and stated that my non-contribution was the only tool left for protesting the manner in which a few Wikipedia editors and administrators treated dozens of articles about webcomics and the webcomic community.
As it turns out, this particular pot was ready for stirring. Brian abandoned his “help raise money” cause, and is now out to raise awareness of this particular problem. He is calling upon other Wikinews.org journalists to investigate, and he has asked me to round up webcartoonists who might be able to contribute to the discussion.
I’m unwilling to stop at webcartoonists. I believe that “notability purges” are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors. They are the enemy. They are articulate, erudite, convinced of their moral and intellectual superiority, and need to have their proverbial pictures plastered on the walls of the proverbial post-office.
If you know of a case in which notability guidelines and/or heavy-handed editorial tactics were used to speedily delete useful articles, please help out by providing that information. You can post it in comments below, or you can (I think?) directly edit this Wikinews page.
The Wikimedia Foundation is holding a fund-raiser. That means this would be a perfect time to contact them and tell them why they can’t have your money.
Explore posts in the same categories: Internet, Industry News, Public Service, Wikiwatch
October 25th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Some guy recently tried to have the filker Tom Smith’s wiki page deleted. This inspired Tom to create the song wikiPirates. It can be found here: http://filkertom-itom.blogspot.com/2007/08/049-wikipirates.html
There is more information about the incident on Tom’s website and LiveJournal.
October 25th, 2007 at 8:06 am
Yes, anyone can edit the article page (I’m Brian). Thing is to source stuff, and if you’re new to Wikinews work on the collaboration/talk page to begin with (second tab at the top).
I have a friendly Wikipedia administrator who can look at deleted pages, so if you know of a comic that was deleted and had nasty stuff on the talk page we can dig up the dirt.
As Howard says, this has been a pot waiting to be stirred. The chair of the WMF board, Florence, tried editing anonymously for a week or so and was most upset at the hostility encountered as a user without a reputation. I’d like to encourage people to open accounts, establish reputations, and take wiki off the tin-pot dictators. If you look at the current fundraiser message it is a noble cause, but here is a case where a few have spoiled it for many.
I initially approached Howard about getting a quick drawing to slot in the right-side advert panel. I wanted to turn a 30 euro donation into a lot more by buying a few days with a “Shlock eating the Wikipedia globe if you don’t donate” banner. I was shocked at the response, and while I really want to see WMF make the money they need, I want to see things like this dealt with.
October 25th, 2007 at 8:12 am
My source for all Wikipedia related madness is http://www.wikitruth.info
If you want to see my favorite story, do a search for “Jimbo’s birthday”. It is a thrilling tale wherein Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, uses his oversight powers to alter the historical record to win a nitpicking argument that nobody really cares about.
October 25th, 2007 at 8:25 am
You know… if any of you really want to send money to the Wikimedia foundation, but are feeling torn about this issue, send ‘em a dollar, and in the comments on your donation tell ‘em “I would have sent more, but you need to do something about the notability nazis.”
October 25th, 2007 at 8:53 am
I’m a Wikipedia admin who reads webcomics, including this one. I had a nice long essay about the issues involved with notability and how the guidelines evolved as people decided to abuse Wikipedia to promote themselves. It even talked about how, in the case of webcomics, there’s a significant problem due to lack of outside sources and stuff like that.
But you know what, screw it. One the one side we’ve got what seems to have been some sort of effort to purge webcomics from Wikipedia back in January and February. And on the other, we’ve got comic authors (and it’s by no means just you) sinking to petty hyperbolic name-calling. Yes, a lot of that stuff probably should not have been deleted. But you’re making it hard to want to help sort this out properly.
October 25th, 2007 at 9:19 am
The article on Misfile ( http://www.misfile.com/ ) was deleted for it being “not notable” a while ago, and that pissed me off. The comic’s been around a while, has a few books published, etc. It’s not some mspaint geocities pixelcomic. I tried to get the article recreated, but it got shot down pretty brutally.
October 25th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Cyrius: First off, go ahead and link to your essay. I like that you’re willing to champion this stuff.
Secondly, until the Wikimedia Foundation finds a way to prevent editorial tyranny (and I’m not suggesting that you’re part of the problem), they can’t have my money, and they’ll continue to get my ire and whatever bad press I can find the time to dig up.
If you’re saying “screw it” because you don’t like my attitude, I regret having alienated a potential ally. If you’re saying “screw it” because you don’t believe that editorial tyranny and empire-building is a problem, you need to UNscrew it, because what you’ve screwed is your head into the sand. Look around.
October 25th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Old reader, new to the blog…
The one thing i’ve not understood about these wars on wikipedia is this:
Wikipedia has no size limit. If you aren’t looking for something, it has absolutely no ability to affect you — unlike a paper encyclopedia, where you have to carry all of those articles around, even if you never use them.
As this is the case, how can anybody possibly justify the deletion of even a single article? If even one person reads an article and finds it useful, that article is of inestimable value. Even personal articles could be useful, if somebody is searching for you…
This is the information age, is it not?
October 25th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Cyrius: I’m a Wikinews Admin, OTRS volunteer, member of project’s ArbCom (with CheckUser and Oversight), if people want a second opinion I’m one of the people they look to. I believe Howard has a right to his hyperbole.
I’ve taken this issue up on the foundation’s mailing list, this isn’t an isolated issue where a lot of people have been alienated, it has happened before and unless it is stepped on it will happen again.
What I’ve seen so far from looking at this on Wikipedia is a callous attitude by a bunch of deletionists. Zero help or advice was given in how to meet notability criteria, so what are people to do? Get all their friends to sign up and oppose the DR?
As with most things wiki-related, Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Howard is giving a (somewhat emotive) call for people to share their experiences.If we end up with an article on Wikinews and a series of documented incidents then there are grounds to make the WMF start trying to figure out the issue. If we decry the critics for using hyperbole it is no different from burying our heads in the sand.
October 25th, 2007 at 10:56 am
Ronald Dumsfeld: Sure, be all diplomatic about it. :-)
*sigh*
Yeah. What he said.
October 25th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Peter is the Wolf had an article written by a fan- a somewhat overenthusiastic fan, since he piled in all the “fancruft” he could stuff into the article. After a few months, it was put up for CfD and deleted with -maybe- one vote to retain. However, I don’t particularly think that particular case was rushed or biased in and of itself. (If I did think so, it’d likely be bias anyhow.)
Two other CfDs that were successfully repulsed, The Wotch and Checkerboard Nightmare, do spring to mind, though. Those two attempts to delete articles taught me two things:
(1) The standards on what is considered “notable” are not fixed; in fact, they twist even during CfD discussion to always favor those who advocate deletion.
and
(2) The actual deciding factor in deletion isn’t whether or not a comic is notable, but how big a stink its fans can make in the deletion process. In the end it becomes a popularity contest- with the pro-deletion people repeating that Wikipedia is not an advertising venue, and anti-deletion people usually responding with nothing more than, “But I like it!” for an argument.
For such reasons, among others, WLP has its own in-house Wiki for its own trivia. (WARNING: link may not be safe in your workplace)
October 25th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
re: sniper1rfa:
I know! Each article is, like, what, between 20 and 200 KILObytes? My friend just bought a 1 TERABYTE hard drive. No one gains anything from deleting knowledge. The people calling for deletion are being rules-lawyering jerks.
And meanwhile, they used to have one, individual article for each episode of Invader Zim. Each episode had its own page, with a plot summary and pictures. Probably other tv shows have a similar setup. I’m not familiar enough with the wikipedia bureaucracy to fight stuff on the site, and it looks like they discount people who don’t have a lot of edits, anyway. Feh. So angry.
October 25th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
I was a regular Wikipedia contributor. Among other things, I kept my eye on the article List of Internet Phenomena; I think I had something to contribute there. One day, an admin came through and indiscriminately nuked large chunks of the article and blocked me when I restored them. By the time it was all said and done, I’d given up on the site, because admins can trash others’ work with total impunity, and the rest of us don’t have a thing to say about it.
I had other areas in which I contributed…but no more. I’ve got better things to do than pour my hard work into a site and have it all trashed without any consideration whatsoever by power-mad admins who are accountable to nobody.
The whole incident is documented here.
October 25th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
If I didn’t know Wikipedia has problems, I would have just said to myself “Welp, Howard Tayler’s gone off the deep end. The comic’s still funny though.” I wouldn’t have bothered even trying to communicate my frustration with the situation.
*Sigh* I think the fundamental problem is that Wikipedia mostly works. If it mostly didn’t work, there would be more of a push among people involved to actually fix what’s wrong.
As to the essay, it wasn’t that great, and was typed in the comment box. It’s gone now.
sniper1rfa and alik:
The reason some things must be deleted is that Wikipedia is that Wikipedia requires, as a fundamental principle, that information be neutral, verifiable, and previously published elsewhere. These are fundamental principles that are required to keep Wikipedia headed toward its goal of writing an encyclopedia. If you don’t agree with those principles, Wikipedia is not the website you’re looking for.
The issue here is the additional vaguely-worded restrictions that have been built on top of these principles. A concept like “notability”, which was once considered a dirty word in deletion debates, is now used as a reason to delete articles without discussion or warning.
And if you look at the history of these restrictions, they grew out of a need to deal with a actual problems. Garage bands with entries in add-yourself music indexes, no albums, and one gig under their belt. Fraternity drinking games described on free host websites. All sorts of self-promotional or ego-stroking material. And it is created in massive quantities that overwhelm any attempts at discussing each item.
Webcomics were caught up in the fact that there aren’t many sources about them that aren’t the comics’ sites themselves. That, and an apparent brief concerted effort to delete them. But even without people actively hostile to their inclusion, the sources problem remains. Take the various Terrence and Isabel Marks comics. They seem fairly well-known, have decent fan bases throwing money and fanart at them, and have published books. And yet, their articles were deleted because there’s almost nothing out there that isn’t directly related to the comic that says more than it exists.
Rules written to deal with spam and ego-stroking have fallen down when presented with a visual medium whose participants communicate in forums and fanart. I don’t have a solution. Wikipedia can’t open the floodgates to everything put on the web somewhere, and at the same time the current situation is unacceptable.
I suppose we could hope that people could at least stop being jerks about it.
And now I realize that I’ve been rambling. I blame low blood sugar.
October 25th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Hi,
this was the first time in a long time that something caught my eye enough to want to register/login and comment. I love webcomics but I am also a gamer. There was a recent discussion by 18xx (railroad gaming community) personages about the wikipedia entries regarding this hobby.. Again, some neo-Nazis are trying to limit/restrict information based on some idiotic feeling of superiority. I don’t have all the details, but one of the individuals involved was John Tamplin and I’m sure he would be happy to contribute to this project. I tried to figure out how I could post on the Wikipedia pages you linked to; but failed in my approach.. I also would not contribute to Wikipedia until there is a major restructuring of how they allow for content… Keep up the good work - and I just love Schlock..
Jim Allard
October 25th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
“Wikipedia:Verifiability, which is policy, says that attribution is required for “direct quotes and for material that is challenged or likely to be challenged”. Any material that is challenged and for which no source is provided may be removed by any editor. ” (from Wikipedia:Citing sources)
The problem:
People are challenging things that do not need to be challenged. For most webcomics, the facts are self-evident. Even deleted ones are likely to be stored in the Internet Archive. Webcomics very rarely make it to traditional citation sources, but that doesn’t mean NPV is impossible for them, nor does it mean they aren’t notable. It only means that newspaper publishers and magazines aren’t paying attention to them.
If you see a page being deleted because of “non-notability” that you think shouldn’t be, take a bit of time and try to find a point from which to defend it. The people putting them up for deletion certainly won’t. It’s as much a problem of the webcomic-viewing public not doing their part as it is of “notability-nazis”
That said, Wikipedia is still ridiculous and is not getting any of my money. :P
October 25th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
RE: Cyrius….
I won’t get into a lengthy debate here, since it’s not really a public forum (unless howard gives it the OK), but i will make one statement.
Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia. Or, if you prefer, it IS an encyclopedia, and all other encyclopedias are history.
That’s the point. Wikipedia takes advantage of the technology now available to give us something different, something more powerful. It’s a database like never before created. It has no physical size beyond the size of a bit, nibble, or byte. It can be simultaneously organized any way you want. It can be searched by a variety of different methods and it can be updated as fast as history is made. It _can_ contain anything and everything without taking even a small loss in utility.
Why, then, should it be shackled, forced to imitate the thing it should be replacing?
- sniper1rfa
October 25th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Meh, you can look at every and any deletion vote for non-mainstream subjects (ones that don’t get sources in Times, CNN, or PC Gamer).
I will only list problems here:
1) Lack of any standards regarding deletion and edit procedures. It’s a total free for all - one article might survive because someone will vote “keep - it has nearly 2000 google hits”, other will “speedy delete only ~37000 google hits, not notable”
2) Rules are not set in stone. Notability might say something now and something totally different next week. Hell, I could edit it myself just to get result I wanted. It also leads to haters getting new bogus reasons every time. (with whatever fits, and if it doesn’t fit, change notability guidelines or hope that noone will o notice)
3) There is no way to police other people. You will get instabanned for calling someone a retard, but there is no way you can do anything to even the most oblivious deletion crusaders (Nick netOracle comes in mind). A little profanity here or there won’t cause much troubles as we’re pretending to be adults here. However, mass deleting articles and mass-posting outright lies to push ones agenda is greatly damaging to wiki (especially that most “serious” science articles fails deletion criteria biiiiiiiig time).
Now for solutions:
1. Institute rules and procedures regarding all administrative actions (from putting tags, to calls for speedy deletion and article locking). Make sure you institute per subject basis. Quantum physics article will have different criteria of notability than webcomics, but in both cases they will do their job (stop ad-spam while preserving quality articles).
2. Make sure the rules stay in the same form. Every major rewording/rewrite of a rule should require mandatory re-examination of every past procedure (deletion vote, etc) that would be affected it. That should make sure people actually think before trying to push forward any changes and that it would be impossible to push ones POV in a form of global wiki rule.
3. Every administrative action should have it’s consequences. If malice or damaging pattern can be proven, user/admin in question should receive lengthy ban. He really need it. That should also cut on internal rat race to get admin status and many other problems. After all, if mod powers become an actual responsibility instead of wiki god_mode, only they people want to help will strive for it.
October 25th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
I see sniper1rfa’s sentiment, and raise: Wikipedia is trying to be something that its users don’t want it to be. Basically, the Wiki is an incredibly powerful tool that Wikpedia is desperately trying to limit through policy and moderation.
I think my biggest beef with Wikipedia right now stems from its attempt to be a pure encyclopedia. I can’t fault it for trying to be something specific, but it seems to be a very arbitrary specification. Apparently a subject’s existence is not enough evidence that it really, truly exists; another party must first verify that it exists before Wikipedia will permit us to believe our own eyes.
Because of this policy, Wikipedia is artificially stifling itself. Users are adding content — as the Wiki model allows and encourages — in an attempt to make Wikipedia a better, more complete source of information. But because that information is coming straight from the source, Wikipedia does not want it, and the Wiki-loving users get spurned by the very subject of their affection.
Perhaps Wikipedia has outgrown the Wiki model? They may need to make some fundamental technology changes before their ultimate goal can ever be achieved. In the meantime, I think it’s high time that a new Wiki emerged as the ultimate source of *all* information that an Internet user could ever want: hardly authoritative, but absolutely complete.
October 25th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
I tried, twice, to create a page for the EVE collectible card game when it was first being released. Once, I was deleted completely for “notability” - despite the fact that there was already a wiki page for the computer game on which the card game was based. So the second attempt I used text from the card game’s website… and was promptly deleted for “advertising.” At that, I threw my towel in, clearly the site does NOT work as advertised.
I’m fully in the camp of those who believe that “notability and relevance” are astoundingly stupid concepts to associate with something like Wikipedia. What in the name of all that is holy is wrong with a new band creating a small page on Wiki describing themselves? How is being able to find out more information about a new potential phenomenon IN ANY WAY damaging to Wikipedia?
I think that whoever created the current guidelines is seriously misguided themselves. If a page or paragraph can be shown to be factually wrong, then go ahead and delete it. Otherwise, leave it the heck alone, what is “relevant” to you may be a complete waste of bits to someone else (case in point: pretty much every sitcom in existence - but they all have multi-page promotional wiki sites, don’t they?)
October 25th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Hmm. Well, I don’t know if my case is really worth telling, but maybe you’ll find use for it, Tayler.
For five years, I’ve been running a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom. My webcomic is not nearly the kind of high-flyer that Schlock Mercenary is, but within the communities of the topic covered, the comic appears to be well known. It’s been officially linked to at different points on several high-profile sites covering said topic.
Back in … I think it was March 2005, that fans of my comic created an entry about it. I was told about it and had seen already that a Wikiadmin put up the article for speedy deletion and tried to list every reason under the sun—including copyright violation and vanity editing. Now, at the time, the article was very badly written by the fan that created it, but some of those accusations were tantamount to slander! I actually registered for Wikipedia just to make a comment on the discussion page clarifying that I was NOT the same person as the article’s creator—and that’s pretty much the only thing I ever did to that article on Wikipedia, inviting people to check the two hostmasks and IPs.
This attracted the attention of other fans of my comic who began improving the article to prevent its speedy deletion. Eventually the article was noticed by the Web Comics project headed up by another admin. The people editing the article sure did put some work into making the article as informative about the comic as you could get. Overall, I was flattered that my webcomic seemingly survived inspection and was deemed notable enough, because no deletionists tried to press the issue … for more than a year, at least.
Fast forward to Halloween 2006. Trick or treat—here come the deletionists. Ragnarok Wisdom’s article was AfD’d by a guy who was going around flagging many webcomics with articles—followed immediately by two buddies of his who would chime in with “Delete per nom” almost robotically. At one point, one of them even cheekily asked the nominator “You really hate webcomics, don’t you?” while supporting the delete vote. By this time I was acutely aware that AfD was a death sentence for all but the most heavily defended articles—a friend had lamented the losing war he’d fought on AfD’d articles (mostly involving games, but these articles were general overviews, nothing like the infamous individual Pokémon articles) against deletionists trying to remove “fancruft.”
I decided not to raise my voice to defend the article. Even though I had not made edits to it and had since May 2005 made a lot of minor corrective edits, I knew that the deletionists would just label my opinion worthless and me vain. I did mention the AfD in parts of my own blog and my community, adding that “If you guys do go to Wiki to give your say on the matter, I ask that you only do it if you intend to give reasons why the article shouldn’t be deleted. As they point out, it’s not a vote—they just want good reasons why it shouldn’t be deleted.” Of course, you already know how the story ends—the deletionists got their way, and to my knowledge, a number of those people who DID try to defend the article were flagged as newbie editors—including one guy who actually had an old record of edits dating back several years (and he protested the newbie label). Some of the delete voters threw in cheeky quips of their own, such as “Hopefully we’ll get around to deleting more notable articles in the future!”
Judging from the way my article was part of a mass AfD by one person and his two friends, and the general behavior of many who were voting for deletion, I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others’ sand castles. Yet while the deletion of my article was a letdown, I knew it was going to happen eventually. Nothing could be done about it; the topic of my comic prevents it from getting published, thus there is no way it would pass Wikipedia’s notability guideline at the time it was AfD’d.
What HAS made me bitter and rather against Wikipedia in general is the deletion of articles about webcomics that are light years ahead in notability compared to my own comic. I have read the AfDs for Girly and Outsider, I have seen the repeated attempts by deletionists to AfD the same webcomic over and over (like Elf Only Inn and, I believe, Outsider as well). Outsider won an award for its excellence; Girly is a published comic, and the fact that deletionists kept trying to AfD Elf Only Inn until they succeeded—it’s a remarkable sight. There’s no sense in crying over my flask of spilled milk when they blow up entire dairy factories.
October 25th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
A minor point: “Wiki Watch” is probably not the best name for this if you want a favorable response from Wikipedia. The name’s quite similar to “Wikipedia Watch”, a website dedicated to harassing and intimidating administrators.
October 25th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
See my user name on Wiki for a debate with an @#$%. He even had the audacity to claim that most webcomics “probably don’t have more than 100,000 readers.”
I guess I’m not notable either, then. Nor most genre writers. Nor even most newspapers.
oh, it’s mzmadmike
October 25th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Speaking as a longtime editor:
I sympathize with people who don’t agree with Wikipedia’s rules on citing sources, but demanding reliable (i.e. impartial, print) sources is the lesser of two evils. If people were allowed to source things to any random website, or leave them entirely unsourced, they might as well rename the place Happy Fun Slander Palace, with a Garden O’Lesbian-Viagra-Mortgage Spam just off the back deck.
The thing that’s frustrating from the inside is that none of these rules and guidelines are secret. They’re all written down in black and white, but most people don’t bother to read-the-f’ing-manual, and then they get pissed because their ox just got gored. Yes, it sucks that you just put a lot of futile work into promoting your band, or writing a sweet tribute to your girlfriend, or describing your feelings about the latest government outrage, but that’s not why Wikipedia is here. There are lots of other appropriate venues for that kind of stuff. Use one. Don’t waste your time and our time.
Take a look at the new page creation log, and then tell me that some moderation of content isn’t necessary. At any given time, I guarantee that at least 1/3 of it will be test pages, attack pages, obvious hoaxes, or commercial spam. As I write this, the ten most recent articles include two resumes, an ad for a Malaysian clothing store, and an article called “Fudge dinosaur” that says, in full, “a fudge dinosaur is a dinosaur made out of fudge fudge is made out of chocolate a dinosaur ia a prehistoric creature that is now extict the idea of a fudge dinosaur was made by (ricky adington) (jake burton) (cody goodman)”.
October 25th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
RedneckGaijin said “The standards on what is considered “notable” are not fixed; in fact, they twist even during AfD discussion to always favor those who advocate deletion.”
You know, it’s weird, but maybe a quarter to a third of all deletion debates end with the article being kept. Do those not count because they don’t support your argument?
As for Jay Maynard’s complaints - that was where there was some dispute over whether it was fair to have articles that could be reasonably considered to be “ruining people’s lives”.
Also, Howard, I love you, I love the universe that you have in your brain, I love Tagon and the Andreyasn siblings and Elf and Bunnigus and Legs and Thurl and all the rest (although I loathe Xinchub), but if there really were such a thing as “notability Nazis”, they would delete your articles and then murder your children.
October 25th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Not a notability deletion, but the event that drove me away from WP editing is documented here.
Wikipedia (and any wiki in general) derives its power from the fact that its editors are drawn from a huge talent pool of people (potentially the whole internet), many of whom are experts in some subject. They’re not experts in every subject, and are seldom the type of people to edit more than a small handful of pages. Or just one page, anonymously. Still, they make their edits out of altruism and the will to share information with others.
This is a powerful force.
The sad thing is that every time one of these people is slapped across the face by some heavy-handed policywonk, that’s one less person willing to make the site better in the future.
This needs fixing.
October 25th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
I mean, seriously: This is the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. There are six million things going on simultaneously, and the “anyone” in the description includes eleventy-billion anonymous [MODERATED. Seriously, Vlad, you’re making me add words to my block dictionary], 12-year-old kids, paid advocates, people with honest-to-God mental disorders. You’re surprised that it doesn’t always purr like a kitten and run like a Swiss watch? The miracle is that it works at all…
Responding to one post here, which echoes a lot of typical criticisms:
“I tried, twice, to create a page for the EVE collectible card game when it was first being released. Once, I was deleted completely for “notability” - despite the fact that there was already a wiki page for the computer game on which the card game was based. So the second attempt I used text from the card game’s website… and was promptly deleted for “advertising.” At that, I threw my towel in, clearly the site does NOT work as advertised.”
Actually, that’s an example of the site working EXACTLY as advertised. If you had read the site’s policies and guidelines before you started editing, you would have known that. You bought a blender, and you’re surprised that you can’t use it to open cans. I’m genuinely sorry for you, but what the hell were you expecting? How is it Wikipedia’s fault that it doesn’t do what you wanted it to do, when you didn’t take the time to find out what it does in the first place?
“What in the name of all that is holy is wrong with a new band creating a small page on Wiki describing themselves?”
I’m glad that you asked. It’s wrong because they’re:
a) Using the resources of a charitable foundation (i.e. server space and bandwidth) to further their own commercial enterprise, like someone who steals lumber from Habitat for Humanity.
b) Damaging the credibility of the project by jamming it with over-the-top puff pieces (MyCousin’sGarageBand is the bestest thing evar! Better than a kitten stuffed with rainbows and baked into a cupcake! With sprinkles!!1!1).
c) Going against the wishes of not only the people who own and operate the site (as expressed by site policies and guidelines), but also the majority of its user base. Seriously. If people decide that they don’t like the rules, they get a big group together and change them. The rules are the way they are because that’s the way the majority of the people on the site want them to be.
“I think that whoever created the current guidelines is seriously misguided themselves. If a page or paragraph can be shown to be factually wrong, then go ahead and delete it. Otherwise, leave it the heck alone, what is “relevant” to you may be a complete waste of bits to someone else (case in point: pretty much every sitcom in existence - but they all have multi-page promotional wiki sites, don’t they?)”
The difference is that if I write that “Diff’rent Strokes” is a drama about teenage space werewolves, people will notice that it’s wrong, because there are books and magazine and newspaper articles about the show. It’s easy to fix, and if there’s a dispute about factual content, people can refer to the evidence to resolve it.
If, on the other hand, I write that Obscure Fansite X is published by a gay pedophile, who knows whether that’s true? It might be. Gay pedophiles have to do something for a living, and there certainly aren’t any mainstream sources that say otherwise. I can write something about how he fondled some Cub Scout on my LiveJournal, and then link to it on Wikipedia, and all of a sudden I’ve ruined somebody’s life. Even if it’s noticed fairly quickly, which is unlikely because the page is low-traffic and gets edited once every three months, he’s still screwed. People will be throwing rotten vegetables at him 20 years down the road, when he’s old and gray and can’t get a job because whenever a prospective employer Googles his name, they get fifty old Wiki mirror results about how he bangs little boys in his spare time! Wheee!
Then, in six months, Wikipedia goes bankrupt because of lawsuits. The End.
October 25th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
You know, I keep wanting to edit Wikipedia. I’m an astrophysicist. I blow up stars on my computer as my day job. I would like to write about these sorts of things, and whatever random other topics strike my fancy. I won’t, however, do that, because there are entirely too many rules and processes for inane crap.
Do I really need to go cite journal articles saying that cubic spline interpolation is faster than calculating complicated exponentials, if it’s mentioned in an off-handed way while I’m discussing techniques for solving nuclear reaction networks on the computer, and how supernova models are improving because those techniques are getting better? I think I have to according to the rules, which is ridiculous. But that’s the sort of thing that should be mentioned in an “encyclopedia” so interested people can see it and get inspired about things.
And what about articles relating to things like 4chan? They’ve been on Fox Freaking News, and the 4chan article is the most worthless, uninformative piece of crap there is. Why? Because nothing about 4chan can be sourced except by 4chan’s users who have experienced it. But that’s what, original research? What about when someone wants to know what “mudkips” is all about and why people have heard that they “liek” them?
Basically, I’d edit the bejesus out of Wikipedia, except it’s a waste of both my professional time and recreational time, because some little punk of an editor that’s busy powertripping can just explode it all, then get an admin buddy to come along and use the oversight feature to erase any history of anything I’ve done, and slap an IP ban on for good measure when I try to defend my edits? Or worse, drag me into some inane 50 page long process where I’m soundly condemned by the WikiCabal and expected to post comments to it all?
That way lies madness.
Not one cent.
October 26th, 2007 at 12:18 am
Summing up what I’ve seen here:
1) There are lots of examples to be found where editors really are playing tin-pot dictator, destroying the work of others for nothing more than their own pleasure.
2) There are also lots of reasons why Wikipedia needs editors to delete articles.
3) Some folks seem inclined to set up straw-man arguments justifying #1 with #2. Please stop that. A poorly-written wikipedia entry for a webcomic with 1000 readers is quite a bit different from the page some guy created for his girlfriend. One needs to be deleted, while the other merely needs to be cleaned up (with encouraging words, rather than threats of deletion). If you can’t tell which one is which, please put your hands behind your head and step away from the keyboard.
4) I’m hearing from lots of people (in comments and in email) who would be fantastic contributors, but who are quite literally afraid of the abuse they’d get (and have gotten) from the tin-potters.
5) Lots of people think that Wikipedia is setting its sights too low. I agree. Maybe that would be a better comment for donors — “I would have sent more money, but you’re setting your sights too low. If I want a mere encyclopedia, I’ll buy a subscription to one with professional editors.”
Aside — Comments are semi-moderated here. Some of you may not have seen your comments appear because they dropped into the spam-trap. If you used profanity or obscenity, your post is lost forever. Sorry. I try to fish things out of the trap a couple of times per day.
October 26th, 2007 at 12:27 am
“Do I really need to go cite journal articles saying that cubic spline interpolation is faster than calculating complicated exponentials, if it’s mentioned in an off-handed way while I’m discussing techniques for solving nuclear reaction networks on the computer, and how supernova models are improving because those techniques are getting better? I think I have to according to the rules, which is ridiculous.”
You don’t absolutely have to, but yeah, it would be cool if you did. I know nothing at all about cubic spline interpolation, so a related reference would be very helpful to someone like me with little context on the subject.
Citing things provides a measure of insurance against someone removing/changing your work, but there’s plenty of uncited stuff in Wikipedia, and uncited content (that can be properly sourced down the road) is a hell of a lot better than nothing.
“Because nothing about 4chan can be sourced except by 4chan’s users who have experienced it.”
Self-published sources can be cited under certain circumstances. If 4chan has a FAQ talking about mudkips or something like that, you can cite it to your heart’s content, as long as it’s prefaced by “4chan states that…” or a similar phrase.
Self-published sources are worthless for determining notability, but they can be very useful in fleshing out the body of an article, when used properly.
IMO, the biggest problem with the 4chan article is that it’s edited extensively by people from 4chan. YMMV.
“…because some little punk of an editor that’s busy powertripping can just explode it all, then get an admin buddy to come along and use the oversight feature to erase any history of anything I’ve done, and slap an IP ban on for good measure when I try to defend my edits?”
This generally isn’t the way things work. If you make good edits, people will generally back you up in content disputes. Of course, if you go in looking for a fight by pushing some wacky POV, it’s easy enough to find one.
Your choice to edit or not, though.
October 26th, 2007 at 12:37 am
As a more concrete example of what Vlad is talking about, Wikipedia used to have an extensive series of articles on the lawsuit “True vs. USAA”, a lawsut exposing widespread fraud and mismanagement of USAA’s insurance business. The anticipated judgement was on order of fifty billion dollars, which would have bankrupted USAA. The articles were exhaustively sourced to various filings in the case, and to relevant sections of Federal law.
The only problem?
The statutes in question were either for a different jurisdiction (USAA is governed by Texas law, not Federal law), had been read out of context (”company” has a specific legal meaning), or had been overturned by the courts. The case documents cited were only those filed by the plaintiff, and completely ignored the defendant’s replies and the judge’s comments. Once I found a third-party analysis of the case, it was obvious that this was just one of the nuisance lawsuits that any large company deals with on a regular basis, and the only reason the case hadn’t been dismissed was the judicial practice of giving “pro se” litigants as much leeway for mistakes as possible.
This is why Wikipedia requires secondary sources: primary sources rarely tell the whole story.
October 26th, 2007 at 12:43 am
“A poorly-written wikipedia entry for a webcomic with 1000 readers is quite a bit different from the page some guy created for his girlfriend. One needs to be deleted, while the other merely needs to be cleaned up (with encouraging words, rather than threats of deletion).”
How do you infallibly sort a poorly-written entry for a webcomic with 1000 readers from a poorly-written entry for a webcomic with 100 readers that claims to have 1000? Particularly if there are no reliable independent sources listed (or readily available) for either one? And is 1000 readers necessarily the right place to set the bar for webcomic notability? Assuming that it is, how would we go about determining who passes that standard and who fails it?
These are human beings who are making these decisions, Howard, and human beings are imperfect. There are more than two million articles on Wikipedia, with that number increasing constantly. Right now (3:30 in the morning my time), there are around 50 edits a minute hitting the server. Even if 99% of the edits made are good and helpful (and in reality it’s nowhere near that level), then you’re still talking about a pace of 400+ mistakes a day, at the lowest traffic point of the daily cycle. Some of those mistakes are going to involve deletion, and that sucks, but short of divine intervention there’s no practical way to fix it.
I find it kind of frustrating that people here are complaining about both the preponderance of rules on Wikipedia AND the sometimes-arbitrary nature of the deletion process. You really can’t have it both ways. If people have guidelines, they’re going to be constrained by them, and if you don’t, then people are going to make inconsistent decisions based on who happens to be in the vicinity at the moment. Unless you scrap the idea of a collaborative project entirely, there’s no way to avoid one or the other.
October 26th, 2007 at 1:05 am
I fought a pretty lengthy one on the late, great Logan Whitehurst, his sister (Emily Whitehurst), and his sister’s band (Tsunami Bomb) a while ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Whitehurst
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Whitehurst
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami_Bomb
The discussion was intense enough that Alkivar — the mod who speedy deleted those three — went on wikibreak for a while.
October 26th, 2007 at 1:50 am
“How do you infallibly sort a poorly-written entry for a webcomic with 1000 readers from a poorly-written entry for a webcomic with 100 readers that claims to have 1000?”
-
-You could start by toning down the delete-first-ask-questions-later technique that most of the mods seem so appreciative of.
-
The article for my own comic was listed for deletion in less than forty hours from creation. No warning, no suggestion that the article be cleaned up, none of those “please help us by expanding this article” tags that seem so common in non-webcomic articles… Just “nope, we’re gonna delete this.”
-
DocN
October 26th, 2007 at 2:30 am
I have requested my friendly Wikipedia admin to dig into the deleted pages and get me a copy of the “Ragnarok Wisdom” article. These are sort of specific things that we can work on to write a news article.
What a lot of people seem to overlook by not following Howard’s links is I’m from Wikinews, not Wikipedia. My edits to Wikipedia are adding links to Wikinews articles. I’d like to think our project is a little more inviting. If you have an interest in news or current affairs, you’re most welcome. Yes, you need to source stuff, but it isn’t as complicated as on Wikipedia.
If you have a story on a deleted but notable webcomic then you can email it if you’d prefer not to post it here or on-wiki. The wikinewsies’ contact email address is scoop@wikinewsie.org. Key details are the name as it was listed on Wikipedia, and any links to justify notability. If you can find a link to the deletion request that would be a bonus.
Of course, the more detail people can give, the better. I’ve seen “you really hate webcomics” is supposedly a comment in a deletion request, can someone find that? I’d like to point the person who posted it to this discussion, to the Wikinews article we’re developing (http://tinyurl.com/25×69j).
October 26th, 2007 at 3:32 am
Sorry to post 2 times in a row, but it might be useful to background why I’m sensitive to this issue. There are other comments in this discussion that show there are wiki people know there is a problem, but you have to be realistic. There are over 2M articles, you can’t watch them all, and you can’t catch every inappropriate deletion request.
A month or so back I was asked to look at a block issued on the Wikiquote sister project (a database of quotations). A user had been blocked for over a week for entering something about his friend under a Chinese word. Zach, the admin that asked me about it thought this was unreasonable. If someone did the same on Wikinews I’d be asking them to revoke the block and make it far shorter. I commented to this effect on the Wikiquote admin’s page who’d blocked this, and I got Florence, chair of the WMF board to comment too. We were told to “enjoy our wikidrama” and the admin was following policy.
Wikinews has had its wikiwars too, Howard will know the term “wheel wars”, and no, it doesn’t have anything to do with the infamous vandal “Willy ON WHEELS!!”. Right now we’re discussing how long a block to give someone - an established contributor - for homophobic comments. There is wikidrama everywhere, if you look in the right places. As has been said, it mostly works, but there is an idealogical battle between inclusionists and deletionists.
However, we’re not getting examples to counter this and show where wiki works. Ya know, it does not to bad most of the time. I’d like to highlight some of Wikinews’ successes…
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Featured_articles
In there you’ll find our coverage of the terror attacks on London, this is where wiki shines. Some of the stuff surrounding notability deletions is where it should be ashamed.
Anyway, I’d like to extent an open invitation to people to hop over to wikinews and learn wiki editing skills prior to an invasion of Wikipedia. :-P If you check most of our articles have an invitation to comment. Say what you like, the only rule for our comment pages is please don’t use obscenities. From there you’ll likely get a welcome with some useful links. It is a lot easier to write a news article than an encyclopedia entry, and when you’re done you don’t need to keep maintaining it for the rest of time.
There’s a couple of people made contributions on the article I’ve started that Howard has linked to. Thank you, and thank you for all the comments on the talk page. This is not a time-critical report, so keep adding detail and links for us to investigate.
Brian.
October 26th, 2007 at 4:10 am
Ah, Wikipedia: the free high school term paper anyone can edit, and does.
Followup to the wikipirates story in the first post: The guy who nominated Tom Smith’s page for deletion admitted he was wrong.
Hey, Howard, if there was an equivalent of Wikipedia on the hypernet, at what point in history would Earth have become notable?
Oh, and Wikipedia has other problems besides deletionism [citation needed].
October 26th, 2007 at 4:44 am
“Also, Howard, I love you, I love the universe that you have in your brain, I love Tagon and the Andreyasn siblings and Elf and Bunnigus and Legs and Thurl and all the rest (although I loathe Xinchub), but if there really were such a thing as “notability Nazis”, they would delete your articles and then murder your children.”
I do believe this wrong.
It would be right, if you looked at notability only from a materialistic view.
But try to change the view to society.
Howard makes a living from giving away his works for free, and people buy comics which they can read very conveniently without having to pay.
From the view of the evolution of our society, this is very notable, because it might change far more than the latest research into subatomic matter interaction (I’m studying physics, by the way, and wikipedia is an invaluable resource for learning, so the only thing I could be bashing is the thing I learn myself).
Just imagine it: People buy without being forced to do so to acquire something they want.
Maybe we’ll have people signing up for monthly donations, soon. People who just say “Your work is great! Please create more of it. I will do my part to enable you to make a living from your art as long as I get good free works in return.”
Can you see how this might change our society?
October 26th, 2007 at 5:02 am
Vlad used one word that shows a diff between what both sides are saying “mistakes”.
What’s happening w/wiki (and causing all the fuss) is not an error, it’s a deliberate attempts by various (ab)users to change the system. The “I have over x thousand edits and deletions & I’m right” claims made by one of the “admins” when the webcomic assault was raging kinda killed off any warm fuzzies that I held for wiki.
gucomics, Last Chaos, schlock, whiteboard spring to mind w/no research as examples of how the system’s broke.
BTW, a web only reference that will not accept web only references?
Wiki was not broken by accident.
October 26th, 2007 at 5:55 am
Vlad: The problem is that the rules aren’t followed consistently; they’re interpreted according to the admin’s whim, and that whim is not debatable. If you’re going to have rules, they need to be clear and understandable, and enforced consistently. “Ignore all rules” is a prescription for the kind of chaos that Wikipedia is, in act, seeing - yet it’s a cherished idea among the Wikipedia elite. Indeed, my problem with the actions of the admin who ran me off was that he was NOT following the rules as written.
Very tall: The article in question had lots of entries that could in no way be considered to be ruining someone’s lives. I believe I know something about having one’s life changed (not necessarily, but possibly, ruined) by Internet fame/notoriety. (If you don’t recognize my name, follow the link from it.) Some of the entries in question probably did qualify. Others certainly did not. The admin who fired the nuke didn’t care. He just deleted them all.
October 26th, 2007 at 6:11 am
As well as http://www.wikitruth.info another good site for this kind of thing is http://www.wikipediareview.com/ it’s the only forum I know of about Wikipedia that isn’t under control of the admins of Wikipedia itself (and the rules there mean you can’t say a LOT of things without getting in trouble) - worth checking out
October 26th, 2007 at 7:22 am
DocN: Nominating it for deletion may have been a little too aggressive, but it seems like other users (particularly the nominator) were pretty good about offering advice on saving it while the AFD ran, and it did ultimately end up being kept and improved (which is the best possible result). Things here worked the way that they were supposed to work. The nominator pointed out legitimate problems with the article, you and your people fixed them, everyone went away happy and the article was the better for having received attention.
Ronald: There’s an old wikimirror cache of that article here.
Jay: It’s unfortunate that the dispute escalated to the point of a block, and Doc probably should’ve had someone else implement that block for form’s sake rather than doing it himself, but his interpretation of WP:BLP was absolutely in line with community consensus on the issue. He wasn’t the one ignoring the rules; you were.
Cbob: My ass. Even if Occam’s Razor didn’t render conspiracy talk laughable, your examples don’t fit your premise. For example, here’s the state of the GU Comics page at the moment when it was deleted. No sources, and nothing indicating why it was notable, and it had been in that state for almost two years. If, during that interval, someone had added the things that policy said it needed, it wouldn’t have been deleted in the first place. Schlock itself was never nominated, though a personal page on Howard was - here’s its state at the time it was merged to the Schlock page. Again, no references, and only a bare assertion of notability, even though it had been in existence for several months. Last Chaos is still deleted, but from the AFD you can see the same thing: No reliable sources, no assertion of notability.
Like I said in an earlier post, 90% of this whole flap over webcomics was a case of people not R-ingTFM and creating pages that the rules clearly indicated would be deleted. If these pages had had sources and a sentence indicating why they were notable, they never would’ve been deleted. If there were no sources available, then the pages shouldn’t have been created until the subjects became more notable and attracted more outside attention.
Wikipedia is just fine with online-only sources… as long as those sources are derived from a reliable site with a good degree of editorial oversight. CNN.com, Slate, news sites like that, no problem. It’s only when you get into “just some random dude” sites that they draw the line, and what’s wrong with that? If they were willing to take some random dude’s word for it, they wouldn’t even need to ask for sources in the first place.
October 26th, 2007 at 7:36 am
In the Farscape community over on Livejournal, a fan was filling out Species pages on the various races that inhabit the Farscape universe. Something that is allowed for almost every other major Sci Fi tv show listed on Wikipedia, and even some of the lesser ones. Each page was deleted almost as quickly as he was creating them. He writes here:
http://community.livejournal.com/farscape/121756.html
October 26th, 2007 at 7:48 am
Try looking at it like this:
Howard has indicated that there are rules governing which posts can appear in this thread. If there’s cursing in your post, it won’t appear automatically. Let’s say that you use one of George Carlin’s seven dirty words in a post, and it doesn’t appear. Whose fault is that? Yours, or Howard’s?
He’s also indicated that he’ll go through and try to screen for useful posts that trip the filter. He did that for one of mine earlier, probably some other people’s as well. If he goes through, but misses my post with the cursing because he was in a hurry or because he thought it was spam or whatever, is it fair to blame him for not fixing what was, ultimately, my mistake at the start?
Should I get up on my high horse and complain about how he’s shutting off all these useful avenues of potential dialogue by not letting me use whatever words I want? Does he have an obligation to make the site into the kind of site I want, even if it conflicts with his vision of the type of site that he wants?
If I don’t like writing around the filter, what’s stopping me from starting my own site with whatever rules and filters I want?
October 26th, 2007 at 8:02 am
Vlad: please don’t use my site as a straw-man example for Wikipedia. They’re two different things. This site is an entertainment site with the occasional public-service post. Wikipedia is trying to be very broadly useful and inclusive, but the implementation has fostered a culture of elitism and privilege, along with a deletionist mentality.
Just because you can cite examples where this is not the case doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. Just because there is a manual to read doesn’t mean that “RTFM” is the answer to all the problems.
When a patient has cancer, the detection of even a very tiny mass of cancer cells is cause for alarm. Methods both surgical and systemic may be undertaken. If the doctor points at a portion of healthy tissue and says “well, these cells are fighting the cancer 100% effectively, we should just let the immune system do its thing” then the cancer (which has demonstrated an ability to win in other tissues) stands a much better chance of killing the patient.
To carry the cancer analogy further, the systemic and surgical treatments are ALWAYS hard on the patient. I suspect that any effort to root out the deletionist bias and elitist culture at Wikipedia will be similarly painful.
October 26th, 2007 at 8:14 am
In the Farscape community over on Livejournal, a fan was filling out Species pages on the various races that inhabit the Farscape universe. Something that is allowed for almost every other major Sci Fi tv show listed on Wikipedia, and even some of the lesser ones. Each page was deleted almost as quickly as he was creating them.
October 26th, 2007 at 8:36 am
Vlad: the Wikipedia Webcomic Deletion debate (And if I knew more about Wiki’s coding and had the time, I’d create a page on it, since googling that generates several hundred thousand hits) involved at least one party who waded in, decided ANY comic not being published by a conglomerate or syndicated in a paper was “not notable.” He then argued that, even though HE KNEW NOTHING ABOUT WEBCOMICS, he couldn’t imagine they had “even 100,000 readers.”
Doc’s comic has been promoted and printed in magazines with readership in the hundreds of thousands. Howard is able to make a living at it, and get invited as guest to dozens of conventions annually. Certainly, JoeBlow’sMyspaceComic isn’t notable, but not even taking the time to check, OR EVEN INQUIRE before slapping a “deletion” tag on it is not only egregiously rude, it is unprofessional.
Said editor should have had his access locked for a month.
When I, in blatant retaliation (I admit it), suggested deletion of someone I’d never heard of except in the aside, this same editor contacted me and started being rude and abusive.
But hey, I didn’t know anything about this person, and none of my friends do, so they’re not really “notable,” right? Using his standards.
I agree with the policy, and helped delete, a garage band who’d done no tours, had only a single self-pubbed album with no Amazon reviews and sales in the single copies per year category, no presence other than Geocities and nothing to recommend them. But I DID THE RESEARCH to determine that (20 Ghits, all blogs). I posted the recommendation, followed up with the fans who insisted that “They’re small now, but they’re going to be HUGE BECAUSE they refuse to do anything mainstream!!!” (huh???) and offered that if they could show a tour, an appearance at a major venue, even music for a third rate movie, that we could call them notable and documented and leave them in place.
The so-called professional tagged everything in the category on sight, admittedly from ignorance, with no attempt to fix the ignorance (gee…READ THE PAGE before you tag it?), with impossibly high arbitrary standards (he also claimed to be “in the publishing industry.” I’m guessing that means he codes for some division of some conglomerate, because he clearly didn’t understand production, distribution, editing or publication), and then argued with all and sundry that he was right and they were wrong. When people sounded off he accused them of “sockpuppetry” and “popularity.”
Ultimately, he maintains that he is right and everyone else is wrong.
October 26th, 2007 at 8:47 am
I guess I’m just unconvinced that this “cancer” is an organized form, or that it’s spreading. Cells in the body die all the time, but the fact that a bunch of skin cells on a particular part of the body happened to die over a period of several years isn’t necessarily a bad sign, y’know? I’ve been editing on the site for about three years now, and people’s attitudes toward deletion don’t seem to have taken a significant downturn in that time to me.
I try to spend at least one editing day a week rescuing articles that are deletion-bait for one reason or another. Either I’ll fix up malformed articles from the page creation log, or I’ll look for unsourced-but-sourceable pages on AFD or PROD, things like that. Anyway, there seem to be just as proportionally many/few (depending on your perspective) hasty and ill-conceived deletion attempts now as there were back then. Some of the rules have changed, but the overall institutional behavior seems pretty similar. The only difference now is that there’s a slightly larger raw number of bad deletion attempts, but that’s probably just a function of the correspondingly larger numbers of users and pages.
An example: Here’s the AFD log for December 27 of 2004 (back when it was still called Votes for Deletion). I chose that day at random from log for that month, and I chose that month because it was the first one where all the AFD debates were expanded within the log. Anyway, there are some nominations on that page that are at least as dumb as any webcomic nomination you could single out. There’s a Playboy Playmate of the Year. Agent handling, a major process within espionage. A whole stack of Star Trek episodes. Picking another random day from the next month, I see a member of Korea’s royal family, a fairly prominent suburb in England, another fairly prominent suburb in New Zealand, a list of major companies from Ukraine, and yes… a popular cartoonist for the fourth-largest newspaper in Norway, along with his publisher.
October 26th, 2007 at 8:54 am
So, Vlad, as part of the natural immune system, you’re seeing things working right. Or at least how you expect them to. It’s nice to know that you’re rescuing things from unwarranted deletion.
Wikipedia needs more people like you policing the deletionists, and encouraging new contributors. If that’s all Brian’s article accomplishes, that might just be enough.
Maybe. For certain values of “more.”
October 26th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Mike: The entire debate we’re having here is kind of odd to me, because by disposition I’m basically as inclusionist as you can be while still staying within policies/guidelines. I was throwing bricks at DragonsFlight (or whatever his name was) during the WCCA discussions and all the related AFDs for which there was even a whiff of reliable sourcing.
Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any suggested changes that would actually make things better. In the post-Siegenthaler era, things like RS and BLP aren’t going anywhere (and rightly so), and if you only let people work within an area of expertise you’ll have unworkable issues of credentialing and a whole bunch of tunnel vision when it comes to setting the bar for notability. As for wishing that people would be kinder and more forgiving, that’d be lovely, but I think human nature’s a tough rock to push up the hill.
If any of you have something that seems workable, though, please throw it out here.
October 26th, 2007 at 9:26 am
There are a lot of people who do that kind off stuff, Howard (you’d probably like most of these folks, for example, and Capitalistroadster had a shelf full of barnstars for rescuing articles long before I started).
It’s just that the breakdowns in the process are a lot more noticeable than the instances where things work properly. Like that saying about how nobody ever called the DOT to tell them that the buses were on time.
October 26th, 2007 at 9:42 am
I’d like to point out the case for the wikipedia page of “Wicked Lasers”. That’s a shanghai company that makes some of the best lasers on the planet. I have one so I wanted to add some info of it to wikipedia just to contribute my two cents.
I literally fought the wave of speedy deletions of the article creating it with arguments over and over again. It was good, it was sourced and wooping 3 paragraphs big with one picture. Just a stub with basic info on what the company is, what it does and the tactic it used to grow through the internet. Just enough to start someone on their own research if they wanted more.
I went on vacation and a few weeks after I came back I wanted to check if someone had added more. I was shocked:
1. someone had removed all my refferences stating they are not relevant (some from Engadget and other respected tech blogs)
2. someone else came in, saw no refferences and speedy deleted the whole thing
I owed that company NOTHING. I was paid nothing. But it had become a sort of quest to make that page stick. It was my small seed I wanted to plant in the garden of knowledge. I tried bringing it back but I was faced with the wall of selfrighteous trolls that I had defeated months earlier… so I gave up. I simply couldn’t compete with pocket dictators that had all the time in the world to sit at the computer and hit refresh every 5 seconds on their watchlist. (literally some of these people respond in less than 10 minutes). I clicked logout and abandoned it
Funny thing is I was not the only one who tried to create the “Wicked Lasers” page. Several times other people tried to create it but were quickly slapped down. I simply got the farthest.
Several weeks ago I logged back in just to check on my account. I discovered that someone had warned me that my images break copyright and deleted most of them.
What images? Oh the ones that I scanned. In my own free time and of my own free will I took every DnD book I have and scanned the cover to upload to the wiki. Why? Because I noticed most DnD book articles didn’t have a single picture and I felt people were missing out on the great covers. Don’t think I uploaded full res. They were severely scaled down and I specified that it qualifies as fair use because of it.
All this didn’t matter to that prick who decided to delete them all in my absence because it made him feel like a man instead of the troll living in an unlit basement that he probably is.
I clicked logout again probably for good. Wikipedia isn’t worth donating my time or my money.
(in case you’re curious Energman is also my wikipedia username)
EDIT: language cleanup
October 26th, 2007 at 10:12 am
Vlad: what I’m suggesting is that when someone gets a wild hair to go after ENTIRE CATEGORIES of existing articles, someone else pull them up and say, “Dude, how about you think about this for a bit first?”
The fact that “anyone can edit” doesn’t mean there’s no social contract in the community.
This clown, one of a very few, decided that HE got to determine the relevancy of a subject he admittedly knew nothing about.
By ALL MEANS ask about relevancy, inquire, mark for citation, etc. But “delete”?
In parallel:
Sure, we COULD negotiate with Chavez, but why not JUST NUKE HIM?
Surely THAT will let him know we’re unhappy, and FORCE him to the table.
And “mere” “I like its” from several hundred fans within a few hours would tend to indicate that the readers of Wikipedia (remember them? The customer? The ultimate arbitrator of success?) think the article is relevant.
Of course, not EVERY character who was on-screen in Star Wars for 10 frames has their own article yet, nor EVERY episode of Timecop, so I guess I can’t complain if not EVERY webcomic with less than 100K readers has an article…
October 26th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Wikipedia used to be the encyclopedia anyone can edit. Now it has user registration, articles for deletion, locks, semi-locks, blocks, bans, oversight, WP:Office, and so on.
What happened? Free open discussions don’t scale to thousands or millions of participants. Steps had to be taken.
So what’s the problem? In the absence of any strong direction, the community evolved into one of your basic patterns of tribal primate politics. To new comers it is aggressively hostile and elitist. This is exacerbated by the fact that most new editors’ first encounter with the larger Wikipedia community will come when their work is flagged as unworthy and deleted.
What’s the solution? Recognize that Wikipedia is a social system with the encyclopedic output as a secondary effect. The first job of the established community should be to filter out abusers of the system while turning new editors into better contributors.
Taken in that light, I think it makes most arguments about why or how certain articles were deleted pointless. Deleted articles are archived in the Wikipedia database forever. Articles on non-notable subjects are wasting resources, but that’s a sunk cost. You aren’t getting those bytes back. Meanwhile the cost of alienating a potential contributor are incalculable, but the current system excels at doing just that.
October 26th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Tycho said it best…
Wiki is a quantum encyclopedia, where facts both exist and don’t exist, depending on the will of the discordant mob.
I wouldn’t give Wiki a dime if I had a millions bucks. I’d rather give money to Howard.
October 26th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
To cite a reasonablly geeky quote that sums up this situation ; ” The only winning move is not to play “.
I’ve been around the internet since the pre web browser days. I’ve seen battles like this more often than I care to admit. I’ve also participated in them both to the good and to the bad of my person. Iv’e had my projects cumbled, my personal and professional reputation made public scrutiny, and I’ve made and lost friends along the way. To paraphrase, ” You see me now the vetran of a thousand digital wars ” :)
The solution to all of this is as simple as it is complicated. On the one hand you have web comics, which are a real, recognized and meaningful contribution to the world as we know it. On the other you have wikipedia which is trying to do a job that it just can’t do properly due to the size and magnitude of what it proposes to do.
When I look at the pool of talent in this discussion, the experiences that are driving people to and from the fight, and the passion that is being spent on the debate there is only one conclusion I can come to.
This energy needs to be put to use towards a solution, not tilting at windmills.
MediaWiki , as well as many other wiki-like systems is readily available and a web comics specific wiki could be created in a reasonably short time. I say that because I see in this thread an outstanding pool of talent, passion , and drive that could easily create such a thing if the effort was refocused into making something better instead of fighting what is apparently a losing battle.
Wikipedia is not going to change. Webcomics are not going to change. If the two are incompadible for whatever reason, then something new needs to be created.
For all the people who state they will not contribute to wikipedia because of their treatment of webcomics - put your money into a webcomic specific wiki.
For all the people who feel abused, maligned, tortured or beaten down by the wikipedia ” tin pot ” types, here is your chance to make something better. Learn from the mistakes of others and don’t repeat them. Don’t turn it into a swordfight , make a better product, and prove that webcomics are indeed a rich and meaningful contribution to the planet.
For all the people who would write, but are afraid of the drama / abuse / etc , look to these people who are reasonable and fighting a good fight without use of abusive tendencies. Work with them , write with them, understand and expect that there will be conflicts but come to the table with mutual respect and the ability to work out issues instead of falling into the current trap.
Finally, all these things put together will show that in fact webcomics are noteworthy - and the fact that authors and fans of many webcomics came together and created their own wiki that has grown and flourished outside of the shadow of this conflict … will indeed be noteworthy and probably earn it’s own wikipedia entry.
What do you say? * picks up tool bag * I’m in!
October 26th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Delchi: I’m inclined to agree with you. In fact, a large and growing webcomic wiki already exists at
www.comixpedia.org
October 26th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Energman - I went back and looked at the deletion of the fair-use images you uploaded. Roughly three months BEFORE YOU UPLOADED THEM, the legal policies on fair-use images changed: for it to be fair use, you have to explain why it qualifies as fair use. Which you did not do.
Bots go around and tag images that are labeled fair-use but with no rationale, and then notify the uploaders that they have a week to add rationales. But by the time the bots got to your images, you were gone, and so the images got deleted to help ensure that the Wikimedia Foundation would not get sued. Wikipedia is covering its collective assets, legally. There are a great many book covers that are still on Wikipedia and that are not deleted. If you care so much, why didn’t you take the time to do it right in the first place?
Drak - my comment about notability Nazis murdering your children is me being annoyed when people abuse and weaken the term “Nazi”. Nazis do not delete your article or fuss over your use of apostrophes or refuse to serve you soup. Nazis shoot your parents and burn down your home.
And it’s interesting how many people perceive deletion as a personal attack. Here’s a hint: it’s not. If Wikipedia admins got emotionally involved in every deletion, they would have heart attacks. There’ve been almost a million deleted articles, and most of them have been unmitigated garbage. Some of them *have* been mitigated, and some of them in fact do get restored.
October 26th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Could somebody post a list of 20 or so webcomics that they feel were wrongly deleted, and I’ll see about getting them undeleted?
October 26th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Evil Inc was deleted, and finally restored. And IT is syndicated in actual papers. Even that wasn’t considered good enough at first.
The Whiteboard had a lengthy go round. I believe it was claimed that having appeared in an industry (paintball) magazine wasn’t SUFFICIENT notability. The Deletion Troll apparently thinks paintball is something a dozen teenagers do, while circulating mimeod notes, rather than the multi-million (Billion?) dollar global enterprise it is.
I recall one comic artist who created a sock puppet to demand his comic be deleted, just to mock the system.
October 26th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Meanwhile Citizendium’s up and running (though still in beta). Their goal is to produce a free, online, reliable encyclopaedia lots of people can edit. (For reliability, only recognised experts can “approve” a version, but unapproved versions are always accessible.) Here’s a comparison. As well as being more reliable, their main criterion for keeping an article is “maintainability”, which seems more inclusionist than ill-defined notions of notability.
I think it’s come far enough to be worth promoting on the front page of this blog. (Hint, hint.) If people who are frustrated with the discordant mob promote Citizendium, eventually the problem will go away, as Wikipedia will only be used to look up porn stars and sexual fetishes. (Citizendium aims to be family friendly.)
And if you would donate to Wikipedia if it weren’t for the discordant mob, consider Donating to Citizendium instead.
October 27th, 2007 at 12:41 am
I am very tall - I did provide fair use motive (it’s low res and the article needs the cover so that people can identify the book). And what do you say about the adventure that caused me to leave?
One other point I’d like to bring up is notability in time. Without argument things change in time. A website loses popularity or a movie loses popularity and in time all the articles and blogs that were written about it dissapear. Then you’ll sudently have an article with refferences that lead nowhere so they’ll get removed, google will start giving less and less hits on the subject until finally someone will inevitably come to it and say “I’ve never heard of this subject and googling only returns a few posts about how nice it was 50 years ago. This article does not meet the notability guidelines. DELETE!”
October 27th, 2007 at 1:02 am
“Evil Inc was deleted, and finally restored. And IT is syndicated in actual papers. Even that wasn’t considered good enough at first.”
-And that was the problem.
While we’re all being dragged off-topic to debate the workability of Wikipedia as a whole, the original problem stemmed from a relatively small handful of moderators who took it upon themselves to intentionally “purge”- I believe that was even the term used- almost all webcomics, since they didn’t consider any of them, or the genre as a whole, as “notable”.
Regardless of how the rest of Wiki is handled, when a mod who openly admits he doesn’t read and doesn’t like webcomics, takes it upon himself to “purge” them from the site, that may not necessarily be indicative of a systemic problem, but it is A problem that needs to be addressed.
And MadMike- yes, paintball was a $10 Billion/year business back in 2003. (The last time I’d heard any official stats- it’s continued to grow since.)
Doc.
October 27th, 2007 at 1:03 am
I’m posting this from my iPhone, so this will be shorter than I might otherwise write…
Vlad: I don’t disagree that some of the material that was indiscriminately nuked ran afoul of WP:BLP. Most did not, and the admin made absolutely no attempt to distinguish the two. For one example, the entry on Randy Constan, the Peter Pan guy, said that he became famous for posting pictures of himself wearing Peter Pan costumes. That statement in no way runs afoul of WP:BLP as written, yet the admin was hailed for nuking it alpng with the rest.
Yes, there are rules. Yes, there’s an FM to R. The problem is that they’re not equally enforced as written on everyone. Some pigs are truly more equal than others. They’re called admins.
October 27th, 2007 at 2:17 am
i´m late, i´m late, i´m late…
i someone said something about the customer being the arbiter of success…..
i donate a buck a month because whenever i wonder something i look it up on wikipedia (or wiktionary or…) and most of the time i can find it,
October 27th, 2007 at 6:19 am
MadMike - Evil Inc.’s article originally said nothing about how it was syndicated in actual newspapers. It only said “Evil Inc is a webcomic by Brad Guigar, and here are the characters”. Even when the deletion debate was running for a full week, no one showed up to defend the article.
Ever hear of “speak now or forever hold your peace”?
The “speak now” lasted for a full week. No one spoke then. Why not?
Fortunately, Wikipedia is able to undo its mistakes after the fact.
Oh, and the debate on The Whiteboard was resolved with the article being KEPT. Isn’t that an example of the system working properly?
October 27th, 2007 at 6:44 am
About 18 months ago, I was reading a wiki article that was appallingly poorly written. Numerous misspellings, bad grammar, run-on sentences; it was just horrible to read. So I cleaned it up. I didn’t changed any of the technical details, I just rewrote the article into English. Within a week I was attacked by the article’s original author for destroying his deathless prose. He also brought up the point that I was completely unknown in the particular community that studies the article’s topic.
The topic is quite technical and, apparently, the original author is one of the top three or four experts in the field. I know little about the topic (why else would I look it up in wikipedia?) and don’t claim otherwise. However, I am a decent writer of English. Good enough, in fact, that I have been paid for articles I’ve written.
When the article was brought to a wiki-admin’s attention, my lack of credentials was sufficient to have all my changes removed and every last misspelling and grammatical error reinstated.
When wiki stops playing silly games, I’ll consider giving them money. Until then, they won’t see a penny.
October 27th, 2007 at 7:12 am
I’m something the Wikipedia and other sites probably really wish to have - just a casual user, and boy, has this conversation opened my eyes!
I’ve every now and then tried to use Wikipedia for searching stuff, for actual research even, and when I did it the first time about a year and a half ago, everything went just perfectly: I found the article and, most importantly, I found a list of references so that I could actually go and check for myself if the stuff written was valid. The references led to other references - just as scientific texts should.
Then I did it again some months ago. With the same topic. No more article, so I actually thought it had been updated into something a bit larger, maybe combining related issues. With a new search I found roughly the same info as in the original article in a more badly written and truncated form - with no references! No reference is unneccessary, so if people really are wiping them out just ‘coz they don’t think nobody needs them, that is just wrong.
The actual usefulness of Wikipedia has come from the fact that from there you can find new sources for related information on any topic, how valid they are you just have to judge for yourself, as always.
I’m sad to hear Wikipedia has become the playground of people who are not even bothered to check the validity of references - or to read the references - before deleting stuff. Wikipedia could be something good, too bad some people won’t let it be that.
Btw, the article I was looking for had nothing to do with webcomics, it was about cultural anthropology and not even anything controvercial.
October 27th, 2007 at 8:26 am
There seem to be a few comments.
Store everything? Wikipedia then becomes basically an advertising space for Viagra, Porn, and whatnot. Notable is one way to ensure an article actually has some value.
Which basically is what got a lot of webcomic artists upset. They got some traffic off of Wikipedia, and having their free advertising yanked made them complain. Not enough to actually work, mind you, they want free effortless advertising. The idea of actually checking wikipedia periodically to make sure their gravy train is still there is too much for them.
At the same time, Wikipedia does have an arcane, poorly designed system for disputing deletes. In the know editors have the power, someone who finds a problem has nothing.
I agree that Wikipedia needs reforming, it will never reach the point that the lazy can depend on it for free advertising, and their thinly veiled requests for that are ridiculous, but they should be able to easily establish notoriety. And editors that abuse their power should lose it.
So while the complaints of those who got hit don’t move me to sympathy, they do have some points buried in the midst of their self interest - so I hope those from the Wiki community can look at the points and reform Wiki.
October 27th, 2007 at 10:06 am
“Store everything? Wikipedia then becomes basically an advertising space for Viagra, Porn, and whatnot. Notable is one way to ensure an article actually has some value.”
Well wikipedia is supposed to be a depoistory for the some of all human knowledge which means your argument is moot.
“I recall one comic artist who created a sock puppet to demand his comic be deleted, just to mock the system. ”
Starslip Crisis and Straub. The discussion page mentions this. In fact his article is horrible.
October 27th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
You know Gamort, your claim that webcomics use Wikipedia for advertising might have some merit were it not completely farsical. The only time somebody finds something on Wikipedia is when they specifically search for it, thus indicating to anybody with half a brain that an article about a particular webcomic is only going to be found by people looking for that article. This is not, of course, a problem with articles about webcomics, since the same can be said of absolutely any article on wikipedia.
Your contention that people should continually watch their articles to prevent some random admin from deleting them is absurd. A Wikipedia admin has far more free time to spend policing Wikipedia than the useful contributors in a given field. Those people who are the experts in a field have no reason to, nor time to spend continuously checking every article that they’ve written to prevent some ignorant twit from claiming that they’re work isn’t notable and arbitrarily deleting it.
The wikipedia project is pointlessly trying to present itself as an actual encyclopedia. This is pointless because it can _never_ be a true encyclopedia. Nobody involved with the project will ever have their offline reputation sullied by posting incorrect information. Wikipedia has the potential to be a repository for a truly staggering amount of information that many people may think is utterly pointless, and this is precisely what makes it a useful resource. Arbitrarily removing articles just because you aren’t interested in their topic strikes me as behaviour that belongs to an incredibly childish mindset.
Every article on Wikipedia that is factually correct has a positive vlaue, and being factually correct is all that should be required to be included.
October 27th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Gamort:
Store everything? Wikipedia then becomes basically an advertising space for Viagra, Porn, and whatnot. Notable is one way to ensure an article actually has some value.
Nobody is saying everything should be kept. By al means delete the Spam, Vanity articles etc. . What people are saying that articles that were created by someone, however niche they are, should not be deleted because someone else feels that because they have never heard of it it shouldn’t be in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopaedia. It’s is not a dead tree product. The storage is near unlimited. It’s strong point should be that you can find (relatively) accurate information on ANY subject.
What irks me the most in the cases that were pointed out above (and the fact that some articles were reinstated doesn’t really matter) is the “Us against them” attitude of some editors. Everyone can be an editor, but when you come in and defend something you believe in or provide your expertise to an article it is too easy to just be dismissed because you “only have 3 edits, all in the same article”. Or the always popular “Sock puppet”. The fact that someone registered and logged in to add their vote should tell you that someone cares. Look up The Long Tail on google to get an insight into niche marketing.
October 27th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
I think Vlad and the other Wikipedia defenders need to face one thing that becomes more and more apparent as time passes: Wikipedia is a failed experiment. It’s a good try and a great idea, but it’s too big and too unwieldy. Its resources are better off dedicated to smaller, topic-specific wikis that can more carefully control who controls the information.
Nice try. Failure, but nice try.
October 27th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
This discussion has grown unproductive.
People seem to just want to share their tales of how awful Wikipedia is, and then say it’s not their job to fix it. It also seems that there’s this perception that there is a monolithic “them” out there that decides how to operate the site. There is no “them”. There is merely the subset of “us” that chooses to work on the site.
Wikipedia runs on volunteers. There are 5.7 million registered users. Of that number, 1366 have the extra admin buttons. None of them get paid to work on the site. None of them receive a penny from the fundraisers. They don’t even get free t-shirts. On Wikipedia, the only reward for doing a good job is a virtual gold star and more work. And the only penalty available is asking people to leave.
I count twelve employees of the Foundation, none of whom are involved in the content of the Foundation’s sites. The fundraiser money primarily goes to keeping the site online against the continually increasing demand by readers.
Wikipedia has problems, but fixing them takes work by people willing to donate their time, brains, and preferably cool heads. A lot of talk in an unrelated webcomic’s blog’s comments doesn’t count for much.
October 27th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
And some of us *want* to fix it. But without specifics, we can’t. If someone gives me a list of webcomics they feel were wrongly deleted, I can try to get them undeleted. If JoJo were to tell me which article he tried to copyedit, and the name of the admin that dealt with him, I can try to make things right. If someone could give me the name of the person doing the “purge of webcomics”, I can keep an eye on them, and deal with them if they’re being disruptive.
But without this, I can do nothing.
October 27th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
You claim that there is no “them”, then count out that there are 1366 members of that category in the very next paragraph. The ratio of users to admins is roughly 4000:1. So what actually occurs on Wikipedia is that about a thousand people have complete editorial control over the work of six million. I find it rather absurd that less than 1500 people are expected to be experts on 1500 separate topics.
Why would any rational person bother to waste their time playing politics in a futile attempt to fix the system when they get told right at the outset, the first time they try and increase Wikipedia’s value by adding new articles, that their input isn’t wanted? The answer is that they don’t bother. What deletionists fail to grasp is that when they tell somebody that their work/interests are not notable, that person leaves and doesn’t come back. Then that person tells at least a dozen other people not to bother editing Wikipedia. The end result is that Wikipedia loses the only thing that makes it valuable; it’s ability to include information on every single topic that any person on the entire planet might be interested in.
October 27th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
wow. So, webcomics get free advertising from Wiki, BUT no one checked the Evil Inc page in a week…
We have a contradiction.
So, then, if I just start tagging articles for deletion, and no one says anything in seven days, they’ll be gone, right? That’s the policy? Written or unwritten?
I’ll go get started right now. I can be a hero and save Wikipedia bandwidth.
October 27th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Gamort : I find your assumption that the webcomic authors are using wikipedia expressly for free advertising is completely silly. Leaving aside that it’s baseless, how about turning that spotlight on other wikipedia entries? There are no end of entries on movies that have links within the entries to IMDB ( which contains ads, and links to places to buy the movies ) , links to production companies, script writers , and so on. Would you also say these people are getting free advertising? What’s the difference between a webcomic author having a page based on their work, and a script writer having a page dedicated to them / their work? Do you consider having clickable links to commercial web services , directing traffic their way to be free advertising as well ( IMDB, All Movie Movie Guide )?
It’s funny to see the silly arguments that are being pulled out of bag to defend the positions of the wikipedia people. It’s also interesting to notice that in the early replies wikipedia people were very gruff and ” you didn’t do it right ” , and ” your stuff deserved to be removed ” and in later replies it’s ” let me help you ” , and ” Tell me what got deleted and I’ll review it ” … It tends to make me believe that eyes are opening and that the commplaints are proving to have merit. It might be time to stop taking cheap shots in an effort to defend something that should never have happened, and start fixing things. It looks like that’s the way the river is flowing.
October 27th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Building on what Buoyancy has said: I’m a little amused, if sadly amused, by those Wikipedians who try to turn this around and blame victims by saying “You just want to complain about getting wronged on Wikipedia without doing anything about it. Put your money where your mouth is and participate.” I’ve seen this counter used several times when topics like this are brought up. I think our main man at Halfpixel had some words for that kind of counter in particular.
For those who use the counter, I have this to say. All that I have seen and personally witnessed, as well as the glaring disparity in what gets deleted/edited out and what survives attempts at deletion/editing, has taught me something important about Wikipedia.
The Wikipedians are right when they say their project is not a democracy, or anarchy.
It’s a glorified game of Risk.
In order to make contributions that last, one needs to play the game. However, I (and I imagine many others) don’t want to play Risk with an encyclopedia as the playing field. After all, influence is what matters, not pure participation, or credentials (otherwise, there’s a lot of things that would have turned out differently)–thus most of us upstanding volunteers are, actually, quite powerless to stop or change anything.
The way things are now, it rests on the people with influence to make a difference–but, to reply to Carnildo, making a difference isn’t tantamount to going back and undeleting articles that were wrongly chucked out. After all, one of the major things that turned me off of Wikipedia was the fact that if deletionists didn’t succeed at first (or if an article was undeleted), they would just try and get the article deleted again, hoping for another batch of editors who would side with deletion rather than keeping it.
October 27th, 2007 at 9:38 pm
Yeah, can we put the vanity article argument out of its misery with a replica of a 19th-century howitzer at 50 yards, and drop it entirely? There are more relevant things to be talking about.
October 28th, 2007 at 2:48 am
As a distinctly online medium I don’t see how any webcomics author/fan could support Wikipedia. At the moment just about the only way to be regarded notable without having offline mention is by winning a WCCA award (which I see was restored in DRV after being deleted against clear consensus). Wikipedia holds paper in much higher regard than electrons.
On a more personal level I can’t support deletionism, all it has ever resulted in is disillusionment, anger and wasted effort. For what? Fear of cruft and how it reflects on Wikipedia’s “respectability”? That boat has sailed … with all those Pokemon descriptions and Startrek episode descriptions.
October 28th, 2007 at 5:01 am
I am just back from the Wikimedia Nederlands 2007 conference in a suburb of Amsterdam. After managing to spill coffee over the opening speakers (including Florence, the Foundation chairwoman) 3 minutes before they were due to go on I followed with interest a conference on the use of Wikis within education.
This discussion (Howard’s blog) has provoked some web comic readers to vandalise the article I started on Wikinews, failing to meet civility and neutral point of view guidelines that the site relies on for a workable environment. It has also provoked one of Wikinews’ more conservative editors to propose the article for deletion. His concerns are that it isn’t notable (ARGH!) and it is attracting “the wrong sort” of contributors.
Wikinews strives to be professional with our articles, and a lot of people coming from the webcomic community are treating the site like a blog you can rant on. It isn’t. We set high standards for our material, we compare ourselves against sites like CNN and the BBC in how we try to arrange our articles. We _try_ to be heavyweight despite when the project was being set up Jimmy Wales expecting us to cover techie issues over hard news.
The entire philosophy behind wiki is anyone can edit, everyone here is welcome to contribute to the article-in-progress on Wikinews, but while you might not take yourself seriously, please take the article as such.
October 28th, 2007 at 7:12 am
Mike: That’s correct. If you see a page that you don’t think should be on there, tag it with {{prod|The reason it should be deleted.}} at the top, and if no one objects within a week (by removing the tag), it’ll be gone.
To prevent abuse of that particular process, of course, anyone can have the article immediately re-created in its last state by asking an administrator. And you aren’t allowed to use that tag on a given article more than once.
That said, deleting articles doesn’t actually save any space. They’re still on the servers, just with a flag that prevents them from being displayed.
As for the Evil Inc page, my guess is that a bunch of comic fans saw it, and saw the deletion notice, but either didn’t take it seriously, didn’t know how to fix it, or figured someone else would take care of it.
Delchi: If you come down to it, cnn.com also has ads. The limitation isn’t on linking to sites that offer for-profit services; the limitation is on gratiutously linking to sites that offer for-profit services WITHOUT the corresponding benefit of reliable information about a notable article subject. If you have an article about a notable webcomic (with citations and an assertion of notability and such), then it’s entirely appropriate to include a link to the comic at the bottom. If you have an article that says “Comic X is a really cool comic, here are the characters, you should read it!”, then that’s different.
WiJO: I don’t think that it’s a failure at all. There are millions of people out there who link to the site and use it on a regular basis. If that’s a failure, then you’re using a pretty strange definition of failure.
That said, if you personally find more value in small, topic-specific wikis, that’s great. The more places people can get good information on a topic, the better, and there are certainly a bunch of topics that Wikipedia can’t cover in a sensible way because there aren’t reliable sources available on them.
Tephlon: The !votes of new users are often discounted in deletion discussions and such because they aren’t familiar with site policies and community standards (and yes, also because of the risk of “gaming the system”). Otherwise, anybody with a crappy vanity article about their non-notable whatever could just post a blog entry asking their user base to come and stack the poll with “Don’t delete it because I like it!” comments.
A deletion discussion is supposed to be more than a counting of hands. It’s supposed to be an examination of whether a particular article actually meets policies and guidelines, and if new users aren’t familiar with those (and 99% are not), they aren’t going to be able to add much to the discussion.
October 28th, 2007 at 7:30 am
Just for reference, since some people have been talking about it, here’s the state of the Evil Inc. article at the time it was deleted. No mention of publication in dead tree newspapers or in bound collections with Diamond Comics, no WCCA nomination, and no references.
Once those things were pointed out and provided, the article was immediately taken to Deletion Review (the internal process for examining deletions to make sure that everything’s kosher). At the end of the DRV (a week later), it was then undeleted, and the information demonstrating notability was added to it.
I know that it’s upsetting to have an article you’ve worked on deleted, but this isn’t a case of bureaucracy running wild. This is a case of the system working exactly the way it’s supposed to work. The article was deleted for a grand total of one week, and even that wouldn’t have happened if the comic’s fans had come forward with the relevant info while the AFD was still in process, as opposed to after it had been deleted.
October 28th, 2007 at 7:49 am
Or, y’know, put it into the article when it was created in the first place.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:12 am
You know Gamort, your claim that webcomics use Wikipedia for advertising might have some merit were it not completely farsical.
It might be farsical except that was their complaint.
Why would any Webcomic artist even care that they are in Wikipedia or not?
Only 2 reasons I can think of, ego and economics.
Now, I’m willing to chalk a lot of the caring up to ego, we all like being appreciated for what we’ve done. Webcomic artists put a lot of time, love, and effort into their art, and they don’t get much tangible back. So a little ego stroking, a thanks for doing a good job, a fan page or two, and an entry in Wikipedia are things they deserve for doing a good job and entertaining thousands.
However, if you had read the complaints at the time Howard first mentioned them, a lot of Webcomic artists also brought up the economic aspects. That they depended on Wikipedia for free advertising(though they were not honest enough to point out they were getting free, effortless advertising) and they didn’t want to have to monitor the pages every few months. They were even more frustrated in trying to get their gravy train put back in place that Wikipedia’s processes were arcane and hard to follow.
Some of them put the work they needed into it. Some of them got lucky and had fans who put the work in. Some of them really should not have been in Wikipedia to begin with.
If they want to promote reform, sure I’m all for it. I think there is a very real argument here, that Wikipedia needs to reform, that processes need to be more transparent, and when articles get deleted someone should have a simple process to dispute it. Discussions shouldn’t be purged and hidden for the debates over if a page should be brought back or not. This has to be balanced against the idiot who spams the same edit over and over to recreate his article, or posts the same arguements over and over in the debate without discussing things. But it is quite obvious that some people have too much power and abuse it.
I think the way the argument for reform is presented leaves a lot to be desired. Since it is based on past history, those presenting it are downplaying their own crass and poor behavior and casting themselves as victims. They lose my sympathy when they do that. I still agree the process needs reform, I just don’t believe the reform they ask for is the one that is needed.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:19 am
Vlad: regarding the orginal Evil Inc article — are you listening to what you’re saying? Do you honestly believe that the system is working exactly right when content can only be improved by being DELETED?
That is offensive, small-minded, lazy, and mean. If that is how the system is supposed to work, then it needs to be changed, and if you are emotionally attached to such a system, I am afraid you may need to rethink your own societization.
This is the whole point of my article, Vlad — even when the system works exactly right, it is cruel and discourages well-meaning contributors. Deletionists become no different than the very anonymous trolls they seek to defend against.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:22 am
Your contention that people should continually watch their articles to prevent some random admin from deleting them is absurd.
Why is it absurd?
Keeping in mind that Wikipedia and Webcomics is all about vanity, why is it absurd that if someone posts something to Wikipedia, or wants something in Wikipedia it is absurd that they should expend a modicum of effort? And note, there is a difference between the word continually and constantly.
Continually could be once a year for as long as you care about the article. It could be once every 3 months. It could be once every week. It depends on how much you personally care about the issue.
What’s absurd is to insist that every article that is posted to Wikipedia should stay there forever, unchanged, never corrected. Since that doesn’t meet the goals of Wikipedia, you need to allow changes, growth, corrections. And one possible correction is deletion if it doesn’t meet some criteria that makes it useful to others.
An active webcomic with a large fanbase is worthy of entry, and ta da, through the magic of everyone being able to edit Wikipedia, those fans can keep their beloved webcomic up to date.
A niche webcomic, with 2-3 posted comics, catering to 10 people and that has not been updated for over a year - eh, not really worth the time.
It may be worth an entry in a wikicomics database devoted to all things comic related.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:26 am
Gamort: Yes, some webtoonists see Wikipedia as free advertising. Most of us who actually know what we’re doing understand that it can never account for more than about 1% of our traffic, and that is usually traffic from people we already had anyway. In short, the perception from both camps is flawed.
Regarding ego: Schlock Mercenary has two articles. They are quite nice. While I won’t deny that this is good for my ego, so is the fan-mail I get. In fact, the fan mail is much nicer. The articles were not written by me. They were written by fans who sought to organize and codify elements of this small body of literature I’ve created.
You’re saying that these articles must exist because of cartoon business economics or cartoonist ego. You are quite wrong. These articles exist because webcomics are a big part of this decade’s popular culture, and the consumers of that culture (our fans) want to write about it.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:48 am
Cyrius: People seem to just want to share their tales of how awful Wikipedia is, and then say it’s not their job to fix it.
How, exactly, can I fix it, when my reputation was unfairly destroyed by an overzealous admin who misapplied the rules and blocked me when I tried to correct the error? Be specific.
Once I was blocked and (unfairly, and falsely) accused of not supporting an essential policy, any chance I had of having any influence whatsoever on the site was totally destroyed.
October 28th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Cyrius: It isn’t our job to fix it. The purpose of my article is to help issue a wake-up call to WMF, who are the only ones who can wade in and fix the morass of broken rules and misapplied procedures. As has been aptly demonstrated, even when working correctly, the system at wikipedia.com is BROKEN.
October 28th, 2007 at 11:08 am
Cyrius: I was going to write a long post about how the word “notability” is ripe for misunderstanding and how it is overused on Article-for-deletion nominations, but frankly I think these are symptoms of a bigger problem with the AfD process on Wikipedia. Namely that it is not in line with the Wiki way. Right now, only an Admin can close an AfD, and once an article is deleted there is no way to view the history before the delete/change. For copyright violations or libel that much process may be worth while, but otherwise it really ruins the collaborative spirit.
I propose (mostly as a base that others can build off of) that Wikipedia allow articles to be deleted by simple editors. But when articles are deleted, they and their history are simply moved into “the archive” (e.g. Deleted:Simon_Family) where they may still be accessed, but not edited and where spiders are told not to index (to avoid WP:CORP, etc.). The original page (e.g. Simon_Family) reverts back to the “Wikipedia doesn’t have an article with this name” page but with a note saying that Wikipedia used to have such an article that is now accessible only through the archive.
A simple user may also undelete an article. If delete/undelete wars happen, simply handle them the way edit/un-edit wars are currently handled.
October 28th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Gamort, and to a lesser extent, the other folks who edit Wikipedia defending this current system: I hope you don’t represent the bulk of Wikipedia editors. You edit a database of knowledge that hopes to compare itself to an encyclopedia, which has plenty of other cartoon references, some very commercial in nature, being modern cartoons, on sale, now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Birdman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naruto
etc.
and then accuse fans of other cartoons of being upset with their experiences with Wikipedia. Basically, you’re saying they must be self-centered, or money-hungry. You’re insulting. I personally find such a view to be extremely myopic. For the most part, fans are creating these entries, not the authors, so either motive is wrong. In deleting their articles, you’re saying “This minor hobby and commerical thing is important enough to last:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slammer_Whammers
but your comic isn’t.”
And who are you to judge that? Did those milkcaps ever appear in a book? A newspaper? Who cares?
I, unfortunately, know who cares. You can find a certain type of person who enjoys tidying up prose, straightening out the rough edges on structure and layout, and is willing to do so for free. This is a good thing.
Unfortunately, there are also those who like to lord over every little infraction of any codified rule they can find, those to who “what the rules say” weighs more heavily than intent, and those who may even enjoy ’sticking it to’ someone else.
I personal feel that there’s some Venn diagram with those two circles intersecting, and the proportion of the 2nd rule-based circle is pretty large.
Don’t kid yourself, when someone takes time to put up content, and you take it upon yourself to bring it down, it’s personal. It’s not ones and zeroes to the person who took time to put it up. Yes, I’m aware of Wikipedia’s purpose–and all the corresponding stuff that itself has about it “not being MySpace” etc.
HOWEVER-I think by saying “Well, milkcaps are significant enough to stay, but your fan information on a webcomic, sorry, that’s not important enough” is rather insulting (which is why I knowingly used that word before”. It’s engaging in the worst kinds of rules lawyering: it ignores the purpose of Wikipedia (does this add useful knowledge to someone who may be seeking it out?) and the intent of the very rules you are citing.
The intent of the rules are to keep garbage off Wikipedia and legal/fair use/slander concerns — which are irrelevant for web comics. Anyone can link them, they’re free use (until you choose to pay for a comic/donation whatever), and slander is easily recognized by another standard you already have (”neutral point of view”).
So, that’s what I think. I just wanted to respond to this fallacious “assume the worst” thing, especially from Gamort there.
October 28th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
I am getting very frustrated with this, and a lot of the comic fans are demonstrating why - whilst they may have been objecting to deletion votes - they were not dealing with the issue in the right way. When it comes to the article I have started on Wikinews… WHICH IS A SISTER PROJECT TO WIKIPEDIA, NOT THE SAME THING! … They’re making the same mistakes.
Provide links. Simple. Don’t just say so-and-so (who I’ve likely never heard of) said such-and-such. You don’t see that in the newspapers unless you buy the tabloids. For this to become a proper news story on Wikinews we need links to people’s comments in Web comics, comments in blogs, and the *proof*. Links to deletion processes on Wikipedia. These are retained, even if the articles aren’t.
Nothing is going to be published on Wikinews until the admins and other Wikipedia editors who stand accused have been given a right to reply. Rant all you like here, but on Wikinews please try to be constructive. I’m sure Howard would agree with that, drama and the OMG!!11! stuff belongs on blogs. Howard’s initial article is an editorial piece, and we don’t do that on Wikinews due to the infamous Neutral Point of View policy. If people take the time to take a look at some of the other material on Wikinews they will see we try and be serious and professional. By all means contribute to the article I have started, but keep it in context with the rest of the site, and FFS… Don’t post xxx is a w***er in the article. It’s childish, cheap, and doesn’t get the issue advanced any.
Among the things I need to make a good article are links to Webcomic deletion votes, as well as links to and names of the people who are perceived to have ran a webcomic purge. They *must* be allowed a right to reply, and to meet NPOV that should be within a single article rather than doing “The Webcomics hate Wikipedia” and “Webcomics, Wikipedia responds”.
I’ve had email from other Wikinews people asking me to stop digging and stirring on this, I was told my “Howard is entitled to his hyperbole” comment was inappropriate. I will close on that with the following *very* important points…
If you want to rant about Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation, go right ahead - but do it on your own blog or in the discussion here.
If you want to see a serious piece written on Wikinews about the deletionists versus non-deletionists then sign up, say hi on my talk page (http://tinyurl.com/2y6ch3) and be prepared to do a little work digging up links and references. Yes, the article currently has a perversely ironic deletion request on it. That won’t last. This is a lone contributor who is quite conservative, he’s entitled to call for the debate, and unlike how some people view Wikipedia, he doesn’t have a posse ready to add delete votes.
October 28th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Gamort:
Otherwise, anybody with a crappy vanity article about their non-notable whatever could just post a blog entry asking their user base to come and stack the poll with “Don’t delete it because I like it!” comments.
I do not see your point. What is the problem with that? It means there is an article some people care about. However niche it is.
If it’s badly written, put a clean-up notice. If it’s too short, put a stub-notice on it. But why, if the article exist can you defend that it won’t be of interest to no-one?
Oh and Gamort: “Keeping in mind that Wikipedia and Webcomics is all about vanity” ?
That is offensive.
October 28th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
One thing I never understood about Notability is, well, you say “They post on their blog and get people to swarm and vote to keep the article” but if someone can get enough people to do that, shouldn’t that make the article notable regardless of its mention in other media? At some level notability should be about how many people are interested in a topic, and if someone can get enough people to post in defense of it, well, shouldn’t that be enough?
Vanity articles won’t be able to rally more than that person’s immediate friends, so maybe greater than some number of people should be an automatic “Don’t delete”? If you’re worried about abuse, set the number to something rather large, like 100 supporters that don’t share the same IP address or the like.
It might also help if there was a mechanism by which an article become immune to deletion attempts after so many have been made. If an article survives 3-4 deletion attempts, only an idiot or someone with an agenda would think that it needs to go through that again.
The article that’s being written looks to be shaping up pretty nicely. Be a shame if it gets nuked.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Wow. This makes me want to plug Citizendium again. Note the difference in what topics are allowed, and that they’ve rejected the notability criterion as too subjective (which it is). To avoid having articles about random garage bands and contributors’ SOs, they have a “maintainability” criterion instead—e.g. no articles about garage bands unless they can cover *all* garage bands (which they presumably can’t). They may not be able to have articles about all webcomics, but I think it would be feasible to have articles about all long-running webcomics with a fan community drawn together by the comic (rather than just the author’s friends). Of course, I’d call that category “notable webcomics”, but clearly some Wikipedians disagree.
You might also want to read their article deletion policy, which contains the sentence “Note that deliberate misuse of the {{speedydelete}} template will lead to a contributor’s ejection from the project.” And since contributors must use their real names, they won’t be back.
And in answer to Jay Maynard’s point about unfair blocks: Citizendium has an appeals process. If that happened to you on Citizendium, you’d probably be reinstated. The admin who banned you would then be banned for life, since one of the offences which will result in an immediate ban is “making what a reasonable person should know are false or unproven…claims about a person that affect the reputation…of that person.”
Advertising? Looking at the comics I have bookmarked, the two most common ways I’ve found them are links from other comics, and mentions on the TV Tropes wiki (which now covers tropes in all media). The others are:
* Piled Higher & Deeper, which someone emailed me a link to;
* xkcd and Basic Instructions, which were mentioned on two different blogs;
* Freefall, which Project Rho’s Atomic Rockets pages use to illustrate astronautical phenomena;
* Dilbert;
and two or three I found from Wikipedia but would have found from TV Tropes by now anyway. Let’s consider these three in greater detail:
* I found Schlock Mercenary from the space elevator article (the “In popular culture” section had a link to this strip). I found the Wikipedia article on Schlock Mercenary from a link in Blógünder Schlock.
* I think I found Irregular Webcomic from a Wikipedia in popular culture thing.
* I can’t remember where I first found Legostar Galactica. It *may* have been on Wikipedia.
If I’m any guide, anyone wanting to advertise their webcomic for free should add it to the TV Tropes wiki, not Wikipedia.
Besides, there’s worse advertising on Wikipedia than webcomics. I’ve seen a favourable article on Wikipedia about a product I first heard of in spam on Blógünder Schlock.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Ah, crud, the spam-filter limits posts to four links, doesn’t it? Okay, I’ll split this into two parts:
Advertising? Looking at the comics I have bookmarked, the two most common ways I’ve found them are links from other comics, and mentions on the TV Tropes wiki (which now covers tropes in all media). The others are:
* Piled Higher & Deeper, which someone emailed me a link to;
* xkcd and Basic Instructions, which were mentioned on two different blogs;
* Freefall, which Project Rho’s Atomic Rockets pages use to illustrate astronautical phenomena;
* Dilbert;
and two or three I found from Wikipedia but would have found from TV Tropes by now anyway. Let’s consider these three in greater detail:
* I found Schlock Mercenary from the space elevator article (the “In popular culture” section had a link to this strip). I found the Wikipedia article on Schlock Mercenary from a link in Blógünder Schlock.
* I think I found Irregular Webcomic from a Wikipedia in popular culture thing.
* I can’t remember where I first found Legostar Galactica. It *may* have been on Wikipedia.
If I’m any guide, anyone wanting to advertise their webcomic for free should add it to the TV Tropes wiki, not Wikipedia.
Besides, there’s worse advertising on Wikipedia than webcomics. I’ve seen a favourable article on Wikipedia about a product I first heard of in spam on Blógünder Schlock.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
All this makes me want to plug Citizendium again. Note the difference in what topics are allowed, and that they’ve rejected the notability criterion as too subjective (which it is). To avoid having articles about random garage bands and contributors’ SOs, they have a “maintainability” criterion instead—e.g. no articles about garage bands unless they can cover *all* garage bands (which they presumably can’t). They may not be able to have articles about all webcomics, but I think it would be feasible to have articles about all long-running webcomics with a fan community drawn together by the comic (rather than just the author’s friends). Of course, I’d call that category “notable webcomics”, but clearly some Wikipedians disagree.
You might also want to read their article deletion policy, which contains the sentence “Note that deliberate misuse of the {{speedydelete}} template will lead to a contributor’s ejection from the project.” And since contributors must use their real names, they won’t be back.
And in answer to Jay Maynard’s point about unfair blocks: Citizendium has an appeals process. If that happened to you on Citizendium, you’d probably be reinstated. The admin who banned you would be banned for life, since one of the offences which will result in an immediate ban is “making what a reasonable person should know are false or unproven…claims about a person that affect the reputation…of that person.”
October 28th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
[quote]That said, deleting articles doesn’t actually save any space. They’re still on the servers, just with a flag that prevents them from being displayed.[/quote]
So why bother?
And I’m confused…isn’t the purpose of Wikipedia to provide information about things? Knowing that something exists by definition increases its potential marketability infinitely.
I guess we should just delete ANY article that references a site, product or company.
I’m on it.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Howard: Yes, I hear what I’m saying. What’s wrong with it?
I just don’t see where compassion and cruelty are supposed to enter the process. I write about 50 pages of text a week in my day job, and in my experience, editors aren’t supposed to be compassionate. They’re supposed to make objective judgements about the quality of prose, and then take appropriate action. Sometimes that involves saying, “This is crap.”
The article, as it was written, was no good. It didn’t talk about why Evil Inc. was important, it didn’t place it within the overall context of Brad’s body of work, and it didn’t have any critical or analytical commentary from third party experts. It was just a list of characters and a site link, and none of it was referenced, which means that even that little bit of information couldn’t be trusted. There was nothing there that would’ve been of real value to someone who wasn’t already intimately familiar with the strip, which means that it’s useless for a general-purpose site like Wikipedia.
If I had run across it, I probably would’ve sighed and spent a half-hour trying to fix it up, but it was basically a tear-down, and I can’t honestly blame the nominator for trying to do just that.
If there’s any reforming to be done, I think it needs to start with encouraging people to put better initial versions of articles on Wikipedia right from the get-go. Maybe a filter that’ll block page creation if the article doesn’t have a references section and at least three in-line citations, or an optional template-based entry system that’d force people to make sure their article includes actual article content. If you don’t give someone the opportunity to create a crappy article, then they won’t have the opportunity to be offended that their crappy article was deleted.
Demonicgerbil: No, that’s not enough. If 10-15 people from an external forum of some sort try to game an AFD, all that means is that there are 10-15 people who like whatever-it-is (assuming that none of those are using multiple accounts, of course). If a bunch of people really ARE interested in something, then sooner or later one of them will write a newspaper or magazine article about it (or convince someone else to do so), and then it can be added to Wikipedia. Until then, it’s just a well-spread rumor.
Also, there are numerous articles that have been deleted after multiple unsuccessful AFD nominations, because community standards changed or new structures regarding article content were adopted. This is stuff that didn’t deserve to have articles in the first place (like the GNAA), but people just didn’t realize it right away.
Sam: Encouraging people who are upset about what they perceive to be arbitrary and high-handed treatment to go to Citizendium is either naive or brilliantly perverse, depending on how much you know about Larry Sanger.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
“Keeping in mind that Wikipedia and Webcomics is all about vanity”
Now that is pure idiocy. I hate to start off sounding that strongly, but I think that statements like this are the proof that there are some people are simply predisposed to thinking that webcomics are something to be disregarded out of hand. It’s an attitude that is both short sighted and ignorant. Here’s why :
There is no clear reason why webcomics should be seperated from other forms of comic art. Why would you toss away an art form simply due to it’s medium? Granted that there is a percentage of webcomics that are considered to be low quality or uninteresting , but that is a matter of perosnal taste. The fact that web publishing is availabe to (most) every person is a wonderous two edged sword. Yes a person who has little talent can put something out there for 3 friends, but at the same time a person with developing talent can put somethingout there that starts with 3 friends, and grows to 3000. Not only that, but you can clearly see changes in the craft - look at most any webcomics archive and you can see how the artowrrk has changed/improved over the years. In general webcomics are just one small fraction of the freedom of expression that the web in general has given us. In the pre web days I had friends who drew commics and dreamed of submitting them to some publisher, only to either face rejection for not being popular enough, or gave up because the game is too hard to play. Now people can throw up their work for the world to see as easily and quickly as they can create it. How anyone can declare such a tool for social commentary, promotion of an art form, and self expression as not noteworthy is beyond me. It’s simple ignorance. Reducing an entire art form to vanirty and commercialisim shows either very little time in this world, or very little understanding of it.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Mike: Wikipedia exists to provide verifiable, reliable information on things. If the only sources on a given thing are the people selling the given thing and a collection of random internet people with blogs, then any information derived from those sources is not, by definition, verifiable or reliable.
When you knowingly include information that’s not verifiable or reliable on one subject, that damages by extension the credibility of all the other information in the encyclopedia. Thus, articles about non-notable things actually have negative value, in that they contribute nothing of use themselves AND actively degrade the value of everything else by their mere presence.
That’s why they’re deleted, even though doing so actually costs slightly more server space than it would to keep them.
To put it another way: If Robert Christgau writes about an album, and we cite his opinion in our article on the band, the article benefits from his position as an authority on music. He’s got credibility on the subject because he has a good track record as a professional analyst and a highly public forum, and he’d suffer significant professional damage if he plugged something that wasn’t deserving. If some random internet guy does the same thing, though, what’s he got to lose? Nobody’s heard of him, and he can start up another blog the next week and do it all again as soon as the next band’s check clears.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Delchi: He’s not saying that webcomic creation is about vanity. He’s saying that webcomic creators who care about the status of their Wikipedia entries are doing so because of vanity, because having a Wikipedia entry provides them with some measure of self-validation. Big difference.
I think Kris Straub’s attitude is the right one. It’s not healthy to care that deeply about what other people think about your work. That way lies madness. When I saw a lot of the initial reactions from webcomic creators, they acted like someone had come to their house and tried to delete them, personally, with a Mossberg pump, and that’s not the way that it should be at all.
It’s possible to be a good artist and a good person without having an entry on Wikipeda. Millions of people do it every day.
October 28th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
If that’s the case, Vlad, then why was Eric Burns (Websnark) references to a comic specifically disregarded because Mr. Burns himself had what the mod considered a low edit count? Mr. Burns is/was, for a time, considered “the” authority on webcomics, but since he had few edits to his name, Dragonfiend decided his inpit was irrelevant, and disregarded it. As for “verifiable”, why is an article written BY the comic author- who, by most imaginings, might be the ultimate authority on his or her work- considered “unverifiable” simply because no outside source has yet chosen to refererence the work? In any case, as far as verification and how it affects Wiki’s perceived quality, a huge number of articles are written on specifically-fallacious topics; lightsabers, the Jedi religion, Warp Drives, how Pokemon ‘evolve’, how ‘Alien’ xenomorphs reproduce, ad nauseum. Near as I can tell, none of these articles cripple Wikipedia’s perceived accuracy, so I find it extremely hard to see how a merely unreferenced article on a webcomic risks topping the house of cards. Doc.
October 28th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Vlad: Sam: Encouraging people who are upset about what they perceive to be arbitrary and high-handed treatment to go to Citizendium is either naive or brilliantly perverse, depending on how much you know about Larry Sanger.
I know he had some kind of falling out with Jimbo Wales, that he started Citizendium out of frustration with Wikipedia’s problems, and that he’s promised to step down as the head of Citizendium by about 2010. Enlighten me.
October 28th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
And on that note, I’m going to take my own advice, stop worrying about what the critics here think, and go back to improving articles. Please feel free to carry on analyzing how I’m doing it all wrong in my absence.
October 28th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
“He’s saying that webcomic creators who care about the status of their Wikipedia entries are doing so because of vanity, because having a Wikipedia entry provides them with some measure of self-validation. Big difference.”
.
Horsecrap. I could just as accurately say you’re deleting articles because it makes you feel powerful and influential. Makes you feel like you’re “better” than us peons. But that’s not true, is it?
.
Speaking personally, I put up a Wiki page as an alternative FAQ for the comic; one that the readers themselves could maintain, since I don’t have time to do so. Period, end of conversation. The comic is not my day job, and you’ll notice I have *zero* advertising, so traffic is irrelevant.
.
As for using it to “advertise”, I get perhaps three “hits” a month from my Wiki article, and possibly as many as eight to ten more from the “List of Webcomics” page. I got more “hits” yesterday from this blog, than I’ve gotten in two months off of Wiki. That dog ain’t gonna hunt.
.
Personally, I’m not too worried about my own article. My comic isn’t a day job, I have no intentions of making it so. I make no money at all from advertising, and only sell a relative handful of books a year. But I *am* a webcomic enthusiast- I read better than a hundred per day, and have twice that many bookmarked.
.
As such, if I’m interested in a strip and would like to know more, well, it’s rare for a comic author to have a decent FAQ or About page; a Wiki article, if there is one, typically has much more detail.
.
I’d have *far* less problem with Wiki’s attitude toward webcomics, if the mods would simply use the “stub” or “this article needs to be cleaned up” tags, rather than jumping right for the “delete” or even “speedy delete” button every time.
.
That’s not too much to ask, is it?
.
Doc.
October 28th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Fine. Two replies, and then I’m done.
DocN: His opinion wasn’t given extra weight because a) anybody can go onto Wikipedia and claim to be Eric Burns (or Stan Lee or Jesus Christ Himself), which makes all appeals to personal authority inherently suspect, particularly in the post-Essjay climate b) an AFD comment by Burns on the subject isn’t something that could be cited within the article, so it’s no help with sourcing issues and c) Burns hardly knew anything about Wikipedia policies and guidelines, which limits his ability to determine whether an article meets those standards.
I do not think that “fallacious” means what you think it means. Wikipedia has a large number of articles (of varying quality) on fictional topics. Generally, the better examples among those articles include discussion both of the in-world nature of those topics and the real-world environment in which the concept behind those topics was developed. All of those things can be sourced and cited for truly notable topics, and articles without such should be merged into a parent or deleted (and may just not have been noticed yet, since everything is a work in progress). There’s nothing inherently odd about the idea of providing accurate information about fiction. If there were, we’d have to throw out 200+ years of literary criticism.
Sam: I’m not going to waste time and effort slagging Larry Sanger. Check out the archives of the mailing list if you really must know more.
October 28th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
I give up. Wikipedia has checks and balances. There are procedures for contesting deletions. There are procedures for reviewing blocks. There are procedures for removing abusive admins. There are people willing to initiate these procedures.
But if nobody’s willing to detail the abuses, then there’s nothing that can be done to fix them.
October 28th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Vlad: Then why is an article about a webcomic, written *by* the author of said webcomic, not considered “accurate”?
.
Who is going to have more information on the work than the person who *created* the work? Why can’t the author him or herself, be cited as a reference? Why is that reference considered invalid simply because it’s on the comics’ own site?
.
That same circularity of argument was what many of us were arguing about the last time this happened; the article gets marked for deletion because it’s not referenced, but references by or from the one person who is THE authority on the work, were disregarded.
.
Doc.
October 28th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
“All of those things can be sourced and cited for truly notable topics, and articles without such should be merged into a parent or deleted (and may just not have been noticed yet, since everything is a work in progress).”
.
And they’re “sourced” and “cited”, of course, by their own works. Information about how lightsabers work only appears as canon, in third-party Star Wars books.
.
But a webcomic, however, can’t cite itself as a reference. In my case, Dragonfiend was quite adamant that the *only* relevant reference- and thus the only reason my entry survived- was a third-party reference, a book or magazine. At least one mod implied that even a newspaper article wasn’t a valid reference, if were just a “college” paper, or an article in the “Style” section.
.
In my case, they almost didn’t accept the magazine entries, because one, they couldn’t “confirm” the magazine entry on the magazines’ website, and two, the magazine references were just printed strips, not an article on or about the comic.
.
You ask for references, but don’t allow the comics’ own citations as references, and in many cases, the authors own information is disregarded, since it can’t be “confirmed”.
.
I agree some webcomic articles are badly written- but again, while most other such badly written articles I run across, have the “stub” or “this article needs to be clarified” tages, webcomics seem to automatically get the “delete” button.
.
Doc.
October 28th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
I thought I already posted this, but I guess it didn’t take.
After scanning through the Articles for Deletion page on Wikipedia, the biggest problem I see with Wikipedia’s deletion policy is that it is not very Wiki-ish. Normal edits leave a history trail and old versions can be viewed with ease. As a result, disruptive edits can be quickly cleaned up and collaboration is encouraged. However, when an article gets nominated for deletion, there is this big process that amounts to pleading before a judge (the admin) complete with amicus briefs (other editors’ comments). Once an article is deleted the history trail is no longer accessible. I would propose that deletes and un-deletes be as easy as edits and the history always be accessible, even for deleted articles (obvious exceptions for copyright violations, libel, etc.). If a delete/un-delete war breaks out, handle it the same way edit/un-edit wars are handled.
The second biggest problem I see with the Wikipedia deletion policy is the very notion of notability. As long as it’s verifiable, NPOV, and not a personal vanity page or corporate advertising, entries about obscure topics (e.g. Category Theory, the Motorola V180, Schlock’s Mercenary) should still have a place on Wikipedia. Excluding those topics makes Wikipedia less useful as a one-stop-shop for all human knowledge. (”Wikipedia is not a phone directory” arguments aside.)
Hmm, now that I think of it, if Wikipedia had originally allowed editors to delete pages and the Schlock’s Mercenary article was deleted by an editor, then this whole stink might not have been raised. Right now, it seems that targets of AfDs feel very dis-empowered by the AfD process which contrary to the gospel that Wikipedia is preaching (”Be Bold”, etc.). Making deletion more Wiki-ish might alleviate that feeling.
October 29th, 2007 at 6:23 am
Huh. I post something that trips the filter. No problem, I was working on it in vim, so I can cut into reasonably-sized pieces and post it again. It gets through. Yay! I come back and find the original has been resurrected, now that it’s redundant. Ah well.
Hang on… Vlad said “Wikipedia exists to provide verifiable, reliable information on things.” (his italics.) Say what? Wikipedia? Reliable? I didn’t realise there were still people who believed that. Or are you admitting that Wikipedia has failed in its purpose, and always will unless it becomes, well… more like Citizendium? (Sorry, but Citizendium has a decent plan for producing a reliable encyclopedia. It remains to be seen whether it’ll actually work, but theory and observation agree that the Wikipedia way can’t produce a reliable reference.)
I had a look at the archives of the mailing list, as suggested. Several tens of megabytes of gzipped text there. So I typed “larry sanger” into the search box, clicked search, retried a few times until it worked, and read documents 1 - 10 of 188 matches. Nothing there to suggest that Larry Sanger was an unreasonable person, but it didn’t reflect too well on Jimbo Wales.
Either I’m still naïve or Vlad was perverse. (And brilliantly, if he intended me to read about the Essjay scandal.) Anyone want to narrow down my search?
October 29th, 2007 at 7:13 am
DocN, if you don’t give us specific examples we can’t help. If you point to the articles that were deleted we can go look at the sourcing in more detail. But simply talking in generalities doesn’t accomplish anything. Point to the problematic AfDs and they’ll get reviewed.
October 29th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Following up my earlier remark. If there are specific deletion discussions or deleted articles that you think had sourcing that you think should be reconsidered by all means feel free to say so at my Wikipedia talk page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:JoshuaZ I will then do my best to make sure that the articles get a fair review. But I can’t do anything unless I’ve given specific comics or deletion discussions to examine.
October 29th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
regarding the orginal Evil Inc article — are you listening to what you’re saying? Do you honestly believe that the system is working exactly right when content can only be improved by being DELETED?
That is offensive, small-minded, lazy, and mean. If that is how the system is supposed to work, then it needs to be changed
Howard, I know you’re smarter than that. Don’t be disingenuous.
The system worked because, once it was shown that Evil Inc. did in fact meet criteria for inclusion, the article was RESTORED. The mistake was UNDONE, and THEN the article was improved. Sure, it would have been better if the article had been improved without having been deleted at all, but no one stepped forward to do that. Did the system work perfectly? Of course not. But the error was acknowledged and the article was restored and improved. ON THE WHOLE, the system worked.
“We are not in the habit of accepting someone’s own word that they are important, as a rather large number of people hold such opinions. This particularly seems to afflict artists, musicians, and others whose careers would benefit from free publicity. An odd coincidence, don’t you think?” - the Wikipedia user known as Isomorphic, 2004
(Oh, and just so you know, it hasn’t been Wikipedia.COM since 2003 or so.)
October 29th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
As someone who has been following the wikinews article very closely:
I find that the burden of proof (that online status alone is not enough for notability) is a large problem in this, with no great solution.
And FWIW, is there anyone whose career WOULDN’T benefit from free publicity? Surely we can find a better way beyond demanding dead-tree proof to determine notability.
October 29th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
JoshuaZ- I have no specific problem. The problem is one IN GENERAL, with overzealous mods leaping for the “delete” button first, as opposed to tagging as a “stub” or with “this article needs to be…”
.
I also have a problem with the requirement that there be some external, third-party citation of a WEBcomic; Dragonfiend presumes that if a comic hasn’t been written about in the New York Times, it’s “not notable”, but then it seems Vlad is only really concerned with “accuracy” and “verifiability”.
.
That’s not necessarily a double standard, but it’s a perfect illustration of one of Howard’s points, that the mods are acting more on whim and personal opinion, than rule and regulation.
.
Doc.
October 29th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
I would like to thank the majority of the people from the webcomics community who have contributed to the article under development on Wikinews. There have been very few efforts to insert trolling and personal attacks.
The people who want to rant seem to have dropped off the site, and those who are interested in seeing what I started go through to an article are sticking around. Keep plugging away at it, and if you’re actually enjoying doing so try doing an article on some other news item that catches your attention. Wikinews is not the same as Wikipedia.
Wikinews can be fun, as long as you get the fact that Wikis aren’t blogs. See http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Portal:Wackynews for some examples of this. You too can get articles up there.
October 29th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Carnildo: There are procedures for removing abusive admins. At least in my case, they didn’t work. He’s still there. His abuse (removing text that did not run afould of policy) was not only condoned, but sanctioned - and the policy wasn’t rewritten. I got accused of wikilawyering and run off.
How can we follow policy when the admins won’t, and won’t even get a small slap on the wrist for not doing so?
The heck with it. I’ve got better things to do with my time and money.
October 29th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
As an update, the article has now been published and is on the front page of WikiNews. Apparently my efforts caught the eye of someone fairly big over there, and they helped shut down the hideously long-winded deletion request as well as cleaned it up to standard. ^_^
Here’s hoping it gets the press it deserves.
October 29th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Jay Maynard, an admin needs to engage in very egregious actions to have their admin bit taken away. Simply closing a few deletion debates incorrectly doesn’t generally cut it. Procedures that will work more likely are deletion review, or mediation, or making a request for comment. If you still have any concerns about the matter in question I invite you to stop by my talk page on Wikipedia -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:JoshuaZ and discuss it there. I’ll be happy to do anything I can to help.
October 29th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Jay: You were blocked because some of the information you were restoring in the article “List of Internet phenomena”, if untrue, constitutes actionable libel — the sort of thing lawsuits are about. Wikipedia has a very strict policy about this, one imposed by Jimbo Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation, which cannot be changed by us mere users and admins.
I agree with you that some of those items were not problematic, but blanket reverting like you did only compounds the problem and aggravates other users. You should have discussed individual entries either on the article’s talkpage, or on DocGlasgow’s talk page.
October 29th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadroon
By the later 20th century, these terms had almost totally faded from use, being generally considered obsolete.[citation needed]
Wow. Someone wants a citation to PROVE THE NEGATIVE that the phrase isn’t in common use.
Textbook example. I deleted the cite tag, of course. I wonder if some jackass will revert it?
October 29th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Who is this “Jimbo Wales”? I’ve never heard of him. He can’t be very notable. In fact, I see his only real presence is for an online, amateurish encyclopedia analog with no advertising.
I’ll go recommend deletion.
Just in case people haven’t considered it, a lot of us don’t have, and don’t have the time to acquire, detailed knowledge even of the Wiki templates. I’ve created a few articles for things I saw in red, and they were strictly stubs. I can edit an article reasonably well. I can add sources with effort. I can fix grammar and style on the fly. I’ve only proposed two things for deletion, and in both cases CONTACTED THE PAGE CREATORS to discuss the matter with them.
as Doc N said, I find wikis of comics useful for catching backstory. And while it’s neat there’s “other” wiki’s out there (PS: wtf is a “wiki”?), that sort of defeats wikipedia’s goal of being THE go-to place.
I foresee the day we have wikicomic, wikilit, wikiSF, wikimetallurgy, etc, and Wikipedia puts itself out of relevance.
Except for circular, unsourced, self-referential debates over Jimbo’s birthday.
October 29th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
I’ve pretty much given up Wikipedia as a reliable source of information. While it seems to work for basic stuff that everyone who cares can agree upon (tough to get basic math wrong) other stuff gets butchered (a number of people, including Jimbo Wales, hate their Wikipedia biographies) or is just not accurate enough (a number of professors reject Wikipedia as a resource completely and for good reason).
Personally? I do my best to pretend it doesn’t exist - there are other, better sources of information both online and offline that I can use to further my understanding on any particular subject.
October 30th, 2007 at 1:51 am
Jigsaw Forte: And FWIW, is there anyone whose career WOULDN’T benefit from free publicity?
Yes. Spies. Probably counterfeiters too.
MadMike: Someone wants a citation to PROVE THE NEGATIVE that the phrase isn’t in common use.
Does anyone ask for a citation to prove non-notability?
I foresee the day we have wikicomic, wikilit, wikiSF, wikimetallurgy, etc, and Wikipedia puts itself out of relevance.
Or Citizendium expands until it has good coverage of comics, literature, SF, metallurgy, and the rise and fall of Wikipedia.
October 30th, 2007 at 2:26 am
Well, with a little (actually quite a lot) of help from people who knew more on the issue than I did, the article on Wikinews is published and as I write this up on the 3rd lead/featured spot.
Main page
Article
There’s an opinions tab where you don’t have to stick to NPOV and can rant a bit, like Howard does here please don’t cuss.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:52 am
Carnildo: The admin in question wasn’t interested in discussing. He insisted that he was perfectly right to nuke the article and put the onus on those who had poured literally months of work into it to put things back. I tried discussing it with him, and his whole attitude was “I’m an admin, you’re not, and I’m right.”
You’re repeating the error everyone else made about me: I do NOT disagree with the policy on biographies of living persons. I understand why it’s there. I support it. What I disagree with was the admin’s misapplication of the policy and utter refusal to discuss it. When I pointed out that the policy only required removal of material that was both negative and unsourced, I got labeled a troll and a wikilawyer and summarily ignored.
The article has never recovered from the admin’s butchery. Neither has my reputation on Wikipedia, or my desire to contribute one minute of my time or one dollar.
Joshua: It went to RFC. The admin in question was widely (though not universally) supported. That’s when I decided I had had enough. Nobody cared that he’d used a nuke when a scalpel was called for. Nobody cared about the mountain of hard work of other editors that he’d indiscriminately blown away even though the policy on biographies of living persons did not call for it. All they cared about was protecting the feelings of an admin that had been called into question by a mere peon editor.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:53 am
This has been a little too negative of late, Wikipedia has both a bad and . The linked article is a Uni. professor asking students to write entries instead of term papers. I personally think that is a great idea; equip students to write entries for peons like myself who haven’t studied the topic.
I’d like to think Wikinews has reasonably acquitted itself over the webcomics topic. We had one contributor concerned enough to think we should delete the article for notability reasons (as well as being an attack on a sister project). That, as I hope everyone reading this saw, isn’t the way things go down on Wikinews.
One of the things I’m most pleased about in my wiki contributions is that I interviewed UK ex-cabinet minister Tony Benn (If you’re in the U.S./Canada and don’t know who he is watch Sicko). Wiki, regrettably, has an inside and an outside. You will get no argument from me that some on the inside need to be ejected. There is also an attitude problem between those who know their way around and those who are new to any of the projects. I can’t be bothered to look for the huge article I once read on how poor online communication can be for expressiveness, but I suspect this is a part of the issue. People take poorly worded criticism badly, and others may outright mock those who do not know the social mores of a particular online space.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:57 am
I do agree the Wikinews article on webcomics was a good piece of journalism. I was especially pleased to see that WN won’t pull punches when WP is in the news.
Wikipedia does have a good side - but that won’t last if it keeps running off the average contributor.
October 30th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Ronald Dumsfeld: The article you tried to link in your post didn’t come through right. I’m not sure what HTML bit Wordpress barfed on, but it barfed, and we can’t see the link now. Email it to me, and I’ll edit your post to include it.
Everybody Else: Comments are now closed. Take it over to the Comments Page for the Wikinews article.