That was not my experience when clicking on "random page" a couple dozen times for fun.
Store chains that went out of business. Airliner crashes with substantial property loss and injury but no fatalities. Abandoned software that was moderately influential in the past. Hardware that's no longer manufactured and someone wants to memory hole it. Schools that nobody "cool enough" graduated from, but obviously a lot of regular people graduated from. I hit exactly one individual out of perhaps 25 articles and he was a minor league professional soccer athlete, actually kind of surprised he got deleted, you would think superfans of the team would rally to keep that kind of info.
It was all the kind of stuff where someone with a reason to research would be painfully inconvenienced by its removal or someone with a personal connection would feel bad if it were deleted. The work of the usual people on the internet whom get off on making people feel bad. None of it was literally useless in the sense of lists of serial numbers of dollar bills by year number or similar. Actually if an article like that, if it existed, would be a gold mine for someone trying to research anti-counterfeiting technologies or someone being paid to write anti-counterfeiting software or a coin collector trying to verify authenticity of a collectible, so I'm sure people whom get off on causing others pain would push HARD to delete an article like that and would enjoy the resulting feeling of having caused pain.
> Abandoned software that was moderately influential in the past. Hardware that's no longer manufactured and someone wants to memory hole it.
This one is a bit surprising to me. From my perspective, wikipedia seems to have a strong computer nerd bias. There are articles about obscure text editors that have probably only been used by a few dozen people in the last 30 years, but if you try looking up information about industrial/construction hardware (blue collar stuff..) the articles are often very short (when they exist at all) and often don't have history sections.
There are a lot of issues around notability, not least of all the availability of third party sources which varies by a ton of things including pre-and post- internet notability. But also the nature of their or its notability. On the one hand, you likely have articles on fairly minor actors and pro athletes and you probably don't have articles on many tenured professors at major universities even though they're pretty much by definition notable in their fields--but there may not have been much written about them as a person.
No. I try to add wikipedia for Open Source Software that are used in many places but that aren't giant and not well known outside of tech circles, and they get deleted, typically for lack of noteriety or not enough external references, sometimes 5 or 6 years later.
Exactly. What the Deletionists seem to miss is the extent to which their entire position is based on negativity, and how that negativity poisons the well for everybody. Imagine spending hours, or days, or weeks writing a detailed, well-documented, heavily-interlinked, high-quality page only to have it shot in the head in a Deletionist Driveby. Would you ever edit another Wikipedia page again after an experience like that?
If someone were literally being paid to push an agenda online as a day job, they would want to eliminate all organic desire to produce content leaving only the somewhat more influential paid content.
Just because site X is not paying for user generated content, does not mean no people are being paid to generate content on site X.
What the Inclusionists seem to miss is the fact that an encyclopedia isn't The Hitchhiker's Guide or Angelfire, and that every page on the site incurs ongoing volunteer time to patrol for vandalism and corrections. Also, the idea that maybe it's OK if everyone doesn't edit Wikipedia pages; maybe some people should write secondary sources rather than tertiary ones.
What the Deletionists seem to miss is the fact that, since there's not a space problem, then perhaps Wikipedia doesn't have to limit itself to being an encyclopedia of 'articles'. Long ago, for example, lots of people kept 'Commonplace books'. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts....
Something that isn't an article can still be very useful. EG Wikipedia has little to say about "Edmond Halley Sr." [sic; his name's Edmond Humphrey Halley], a father who proved critical to his son's success, and whose mysterious death complicated his son's life in multiple ways. I spent two hours online learning how and why (w/cites), but there's no room in the WP inn for publishing that summary.
None of them miss that fact. It's the most basic, common argument people throw at their position. People who know virtually nothing about what Wikipedia is --- see: this thread --- have no trouble coming up with that argument off the top of their head.
Once again: space has nothing to do with the argument for Deletionism. It isn't an elaborate form of garbage collection and encyclopedia-compression. If you're going to argue against their position, you have to go read what it is. They're not hiding it; this may be the most elaborately, carefully documented policy on any major site on the Internet, and your argument doesn't engage with it at all.
Oh I know the arguments, and I'm more than long-familiar with the tactics and their motivations.
I'm arguing for the addition of a new branch to which serious researchers might append their (cited) notes without all the additional labor needed to create a whole 'acceptable' article. (For all I care, they could even load them down with all the usual, tired caveats.)
This stuff can just go somewhere else online that's much harder to find. No skin off my ass if WP has no alternate mechanism to add serious, skilled research. (Compare to any great library....) Any WP user who wants more will, individually, have to put in the same 2 hours I did. Great solution.
Wikipedia is not limited by the number of pages that exist in a volume. A given page existing doesn't generally make it harder to find another entry. The notability criterion is more applicable to an encyclopedia limited by disc or paper space.
Meanwhile Wikipedia's own policies are violated with the comprehensive detailed list of Pokemon and sub-articles that really belongs on a dedicated wiki.
Do you really think that the subject of a Wikipedia article should decide whether they are notable or not? Seems a bit hypocritical given your deletionist stance.
I agree, there are a ridiculous number of vanity pages on Wikipedia and quite frankly, grossly inconsistent enforcement. Wikipedia is being used as a tool for building a personal profile and achieve SEO goals around Google searches for particular people's name.
My particular pet peeve are the surprising number of bios of wealthy people who have done absolutely nothing remarkable or noteworthy other than be exceptionally successful at marketing themselves, which allows them to get their name pop up in the occasional mainstream media article. Of course those mentions are just churnalism in a puff section of the newspaper, cobbled together from quotes ripped out of a press release. But apparently that's enough to satisfy "notability". And of course these articles are almost always predominantly maintained by single purpose accounts; most likely sock puppets of the person in question.
