I feel like the post is long without really understanding why things are the way they are. It strawmans.
Given how important Wikipedia articles happen to be, there are a lot of interests that want to bend Wikipedia to their liking. If you take the notability policy, it’s not just there because people believe in academic standards but because an article for a topic for which there are few reliable sources can be a lot easier to manipulate.
One thing that was proposed somewhere in the Wikimedia’s internal mailing list is to introduce a reliability metrics level for all articles in Wikipedia and be prominently displayed to all readers. That could be a sensible compromise approach instead of subjecting it to the binary dillema of festering malicious manipulation through inclusion and making the whole “systemic bias” issue more serious by not including or censoring given topics.
I have to agree with both the original creator of the post (since it is released under public domain elsewhere and I simply copied it to here) and mako yass that notability is genuinely subjective. There are even large differences in the minutae on how to treat information that are edge-case reliable; some advocate exclusion while some advocate conditional inclusion with in-line citation and so on.
It sounds to me like you ignore my main claim. The OP strawmans why people on Wikipedia hold exclusionist positions. Understanding is actually pretty important if you want to change anything that goes on in Wikipedia.
Introducing something like “reliability metrics” is something that a Wikipedia community could decide because it’s a policy question. It’s not something over which the Wikimedia Foundation has any jurisdiction and thus it’s strange to try to discuss it in a Wikimedia’s internal mailing list instead of discussing it on Wikipedia.
Okay. So you say that there is a fear of undue manipulation behind so-called deletionism, however that alone is vulnerable to subjective interpretation as well, same as the interpretation of notability. From experience and that of others like the OP there are cases that even if given information fits well up to the standards of neutrality, verifiably, notability, not a copyright violation, relevant enough and doesn’t present issues in terms of “biographical of living persons”, they are still left out on pertaining articles or topics by the whims of “VNOT” leaving rooms or holes for groups of editors to exclude certain information simply because they “don’t like it”.
People are bound to have radically different views on any minutae at any given moment. Squeeze them altogether in one place means that they are bound to generate large conflicts and issues, which Wikipedia is currently facing since it’s pretty much the only place where people can “change or dictate history”.
I have to agree with StartAtTheEnd that the three major factors behind biased or otherwise inadequate articles which are prone to edit conflicts are: Emotional, ideological/political, and economic.
Communities are made up of people who have subjective experiences. It’s nothing that you can’t prevent.
Squeeze them altogether in one place means that they are bound to generate large conflicts and issues, which Wikipedia is currently facing since it’s pretty much the only place where people can “change or dictate history”.
Wikipedia is a place where that happens because of the high-quality level that Wikipedia has.
It’s no perfect place and there are certainly reforms that would be good, but for that you actually have to understand Wikipedia a bit better
There were many attempts to build alternatives. Those mostly didn’t lead to projects with comparable value.
Communities are made up of people who have subjective experiences. It’s nothing that you can’t prevent.
Wikipedia is a place where that happens because of the high-quality level that Wikipedia has.
Wikipedia is also pretty much the only place where human history can be written and edited which affects the knowledge of future generations. That alone had given it so much strategic value and incentives for all sorts of actors to control or game it, however there’s as if the higher echelons are trapped in office politics and doesn’t really seem to realise what sort of implications are going to occur if they let themselves be gamed by malicious actors, which is exactly what happened during the Holocaust distortion scandal which was uncovered by Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski.
Think about this, if people decide to stop using Facebook for any reason because they hate Mark Zuckerberg and his policies, there are off-ramps like Reddit and Twitter to switch to. Not the case for Wikipedia, where no meaningful redresses had existed for a very long time are possible if they fall out with Wikipedia for some reason. Practically almost all of general-level knowledges we learn on the Internet comes in whole or in part from Wikipedia. The analogy about the restaurant in the food desert by OP sounds about right.
After all, despite backbreaking efforts by Jess Wade, Wikipedia still has systemic biases against female figures, such as usage of citations.
however there’s as if the higher echelons are trapped in office politics and doesn’t really seem to realise what sort of implications are going to occur if they let themselves be gamed by malicious actors
It’s quite ironic that you say that at the same time as speaking against actions that are about making it harder to game Wikipedia by malicious actors.
Wikipedia isn’t perfect but all decisions have their tradeoffs and when you don’t think about those, that’s not really the basis for improving anything.
It’s amplified in a large magnitude on Wikipedia which acts like a monopoly on the knowledge market.
There are plenty of different ways knowledge is published on the web and Wikipedia does not have a monopoly on knowledge. What it has is a community that in all its flaws has a decent process that produces valuable outcomes.
Nobody found a way to set up the way a community around the topic works better than Wikipedia.
It’s quite ironic that you say that at the same time as speaking against actions that are about making it harder to game Wikipedia by malicious actors.
Wikipedia isn’t perfect but all decisions have their tradeoffs and when you don’t think about those, that’s not really the basis for improving anything.
The Arbitration Committee (Arbcom) of Wikipedia was given a fair chance to actually stop the Holocaust distortion problem by banning all the ultranationalist distortionists from the topic area. The actually doled out measures were far lenient than expected with Piotrus, the ringleader of the distortionists, walking off scots-free, although with all fairness some such as Volunteer Marek received bans from the topic area.
There are plenty of different ways knowledge is published on the web and Wikipedia does not have a monopoly on knowledge.
This Telegraph feature article begs to differ. Wikipedia has been used as contents for eternal disks in space missions, court judgements and even is part of a trope in Andy Weir’s Hail Mary where it’s implicitly touted as the sum and representative of human civilization when the astronaut gives a copy of it to the fictional aliens from the Epsilon Eridani system. No other encyclopedia, not even the Britannica which has far less entries yet are higher in quality, enjoys that kind of treatment. With that I stand by the OP and other’s belief that Wikipedia acts like a monopoly on knowledge, at least on the Internet.
Nobody found a way to set up the way a community around the topic works better than Wikipedia.
It doesn’t mean that it’s not worth a try though. In fact this could be one of the best candidates for cause prioritization. After all the community issues have boiled over weeks ago, when a WikiConference event in Toronto Reference Library was hit by a phony bomb threat, reportedly by disgruntled user(s) who were treated badly there.
There’s also an unpublished book detailing Wikipedia problems and scandals by Eric Barbour, which was reviewed by Larry Sanger and Andreas Kolbe (yes, that one!) and which summaries can be viewed here. It’s not just an imperfect institution; it’s a corrupt one. WMF is unexpectedly litigation happy against anyone, especially investigative journalists who dared to lift their veils and hence the book and the general idea that “Wikipedia has a bad side too” remains largely absent in mainstream discourse so far.
I feel like the post is long without really understanding why things are the way they are. It strawmans.
Given how important Wikipedia articles happen to be, there are a lot of interests that want to bend Wikipedia to their liking. If you take the notability policy, it’s not just there because people believe in academic standards but because an article for a topic for which there are few reliable sources can be a lot easier to manipulate.
One thing that was proposed somewhere in the Wikimedia’s internal mailing list is to introduce a reliability metrics level for all articles in Wikipedia and be prominently displayed to all readers. That could be a sensible compromise approach instead of subjecting it to the binary dillema of festering malicious manipulation through inclusion and making the whole “systemic bias” issue more serious by not including or censoring given topics.
I have to agree with both the original creator of the post (since it is released under public domain elsewhere and I simply copied it to here) and mako yass that notability is genuinely subjective. There are even large differences in the minutae on how to treat information that are edge-case reliable; some advocate exclusion while some advocate conditional inclusion with in-line citation and so on.
It sounds to me like you ignore my main claim. The OP strawmans why people on Wikipedia hold exclusionist positions. Understanding is actually pretty important if you want to change anything that goes on in Wikipedia.
Introducing something like “reliability metrics” is something that a Wikipedia community could decide because it’s a policy question. It’s not something over which the Wikimedia Foundation has any jurisdiction and thus it’s strange to try to discuss it in a Wikimedia’s internal mailing list instead of discussing it on Wikipedia.
Okay. So you say that there is a fear of undue manipulation behind so-called deletionism, however that alone is vulnerable to subjective interpretation as well, same as the interpretation of notability. From experience and that of others like the OP there are cases that even if given information fits well up to the standards of neutrality, verifiably, notability, not a copyright violation, relevant enough and doesn’t present issues in terms of “biographical of living persons”, they are still left out on pertaining articles or topics by the whims of “VNOT” leaving rooms or holes for groups of editors to exclude certain information simply because they “don’t like it”.
People are bound to have radically different views on any minutae at any given moment. Squeeze them altogether in one place means that they are bound to generate large conflicts and issues, which Wikipedia is currently facing since it’s pretty much the only place where people can “change or dictate history”.
I have to agree with StartAtTheEnd that the three major factors behind biased or otherwise inadequate articles which are prone to edit conflicts are: Emotional, ideological/political, and economic.
Communities are made up of people who have subjective experiences. It’s nothing that you can’t prevent.
Wikipedia is a place where that happens because of the high-quality level that Wikipedia has.
It’s no perfect place and there are certainly reforms that would be good, but for that you actually have to understand Wikipedia a bit better
There were many attempts to build alternatives. Those mostly didn’t lead to projects with comparable value.
Wikipedia is also pretty much the only place where human history can be written and edited which affects the knowledge of future generations. That alone had given it so much strategic value and incentives for all sorts of actors to control or game it, however there’s as if the higher echelons are trapped in office politics and doesn’t really seem to realise what sort of implications are going to occur if they let themselves be gamed by malicious actors, which is exactly what happened during the Holocaust distortion scandal which was uncovered by Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski.
Think about this, if people decide to stop using Facebook for any reason because they hate Mark Zuckerberg and his policies, there are off-ramps like Reddit and Twitter to switch to. Not the case for Wikipedia, where no meaningful redresses had existed for a very long time are possible if they fall out with Wikipedia for some reason. Practically almost all of general-level knowledges we learn on the Internet comes in whole or in part from Wikipedia. The analogy about the restaurant in the food desert by OP sounds about right.
After all, despite backbreaking efforts by Jess Wade, Wikipedia still has systemic biases against female figures, such as usage of citations.
Power is a strong source for corruption, no exceptions. It’s amplified in a large magnitude on Wikipedia which acts like a monopoly on the knowledge market. The other day a journalist has uncovered two dozen Weinstein type scandals on Wikipedia perpertrated by admins and users which could do far larger reputational damage against Wikipedia movement itself if published in the media.
In terms of off-ramps and alternatives there exist two platforms now—Encycla and Justapedia.
Edit: Since Gwern has commented here as well here is their essay expressing concerns about the dominance of deletionism at Wikipedia.
It’s quite ironic that you say that at the same time as speaking against actions that are about making it harder to game Wikipedia by malicious actors.
Wikipedia isn’t perfect but all decisions have their tradeoffs and when you don’t think about those, that’s not really the basis for improving anything.
There are plenty of different ways knowledge is published on the web and Wikipedia does not have a monopoly on knowledge. What it has is a community that in all its flaws has a decent process that produces valuable outcomes.
Nobody found a way to set up the way a community around the topic works better than Wikipedia.
The Arbitration Committee (Arbcom) of Wikipedia was given a fair chance to actually stop the Holocaust distortion problem by banning all the ultranationalist distortionists from the topic area. The actually doled out measures were far lenient than expected with Piotrus, the ringleader of the distortionists, walking off scots-free, although with all fairness some such as Volunteer Marek received bans from the topic area.
This Telegraph feature article begs to differ. Wikipedia has been used as contents for eternal disks in space missions, court judgements and even is part of a trope in Andy Weir’s Hail Mary where it’s implicitly touted as the sum and representative of human civilization when the astronaut gives a copy of it to the fictional aliens from the Epsilon Eridani system. No other encyclopedia, not even the Britannica which has far less entries yet are higher in quality, enjoys that kind of treatment. With that I stand by the OP and other’s belief that Wikipedia acts like a monopoly on knowledge, at least on the Internet.
It doesn’t mean that it’s not worth a try though. In fact this could be one of the best candidates for cause prioritization. After all the community issues have boiled over weeks ago, when a WikiConference event in Toronto Reference Library was hit by a phony bomb threat, reportedly by disgruntled user(s) who were treated badly there.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/bomb-threat-toronto-reference-library-1.7026287
https://twitter.com/AustinReporting/status/1723351006975582613
There’s also an unpublished book detailing Wikipedia problems and scandals by Eric Barbour, which was reviewed by Larry Sanger and Andreas Kolbe (yes, that one!) and which summaries can be viewed here. It’s not just an imperfect institution; it’s a corrupt one. WMF is unexpectedly litigation happy against anyone, especially investigative journalists who dared to lift their veils and hence the book and the general idea that “Wikipedia has a bad side too” remains largely absent in mainstream discourse so far.