I came across a huge article on some magazine marked for deletion the other day. The amount of work that had gone into the article was extensive, and it made me sad. While my little article about a small pile of sand in the middle of nowhere has ironically been translated into nine languages:
"Notability" is a weapon used by many editors to get rid of entries that go against their views. I've seen it used to keep off pages for highly-selling authors who hold contrary views to certain viewpoints even though they are better-known and more highly cited than authors who advocate to those certain viewpoints who get to keep their pages. No one should be able to gatekeep in this way, and there should not be anyone who can claim a page and make it theirs, keeping off any and all edits or challenges by others.
As far as I understand, this idea of notability also adversely impacts science publishing, it's not published by reputable journals unless it's notable, which skews incentives and also means there's probably some useful information out there left to someone else to rediscover.
I wish there was an easier way to find deleted articles. You can see all versions of an article but if it's gone there seems to be no way to see anything.
This is by design. A lot of articles, especially recently created ones, get deleted because they consist of material which is legally problematic (e.g. text which is a copyright violation, which is libelous, which violates someone's privacy, etc).
Doesn't that use a different deletion mechanism? Afaik you can still see "normally" deleted edits and articles if you have the revision link, but those who have been deleted for legal reasons are wiped from history and their revision or edit link are blanked out
> Doesn't that use a different deletion mechanism?
Generally not. There is a separate process called "oversight" [1] which behaves the way you're describing, but it can only be invoked by a very small number of privileged users, and is only used in extreme cases.
Probably because you exploit this. Do this a bunch in some what that leans towards whatever your agenda is and eventually one of those articles will get a bunch of hits and attention before anyone considers revising it.
Nothing is destroyed; the person who wrote the article can ask an admin to get its text back so they can publish it elsewhere. I don’t get this "Wikipedia should host everything" mentality: if you disagree with the rules, just publish your work somewhere else. The number of articles need to be manageable, so rules are needed.
surely if an article exists and is shown to be being poorly maintained, then perhaps it's worthy of dormancy or maybe deletion. why do it pre-emptively?
It's interesting, I always theoretically appreciated that wikipedia could be inaccurate and that the strict requirements could be a bad thing, but I never saw it in action. Until I was in Tunisia and wanted to visit all the star wars film sites that I could.
There's a place called Ksar Ouled Soltane [0] and I couldn't quite figure out if it was a film site or not. The locals assured me it was, but there were conflicting reports online. I saw that it was listed on Wikipedia, but when I went through the history, I saw that someone tried to remove it [1]. Unfortunately their removal was reverted and their source [2] wasn't considered good enough.
That said, I read their article and I'm much more inclined to believe them than the wikipedia editors.
It was the first time I ever encountered something like this in the wild.
I have followed Ukraine-Russia related articles for a decade and saw thousands of articles changed over that time span.
One thing that always stood out to me was how till 2014 you could find many references on wikipedia to pre-2014 attempts from Crimea to secede from Ukraine.
"Crimea" (quoted, as it may refer to different groups/leaderships in Crimea) tried to split from Ukraine twice already during Soviet times.
But this whole thing got edited away in years across dozens of articles.
I think there's a significant nuance between the two narratives.
I'm much more inclusionist than deletionist. And find there's a lot of both randomness and irony in what qualifies as notable, especially given that notability can be a very local thing. On the other hand, it's probably fair that not everyone who has ever had their name in print or has a website should have a Wikipedia entry.
The ugliest edit war I've seen involved a less-known adult film star.
Her legal name had appeared in some public court filings, and some user had added it to her Wikipedia page with the reference.
Someone else (purportedly one of her co-stars) had requested removal.
A Wikipedia editor then got involved, and refused to budge from the position the original actress was notable enough to merit inclusion of her legal name.
Cue months of back-and-forth deletions and reversions.
Finally, I think a year later, someone quietly edited the legal name out and it stuck.
Sometimes people with a little power are the greatest assholes. Probably because they sought the little power.
What is worse is the people who went thru the trouble to make those edits in the first place will conclude that it is not worth the trouble to fix this. Then go on to not make other edits because 'of that last time'. That sort of fight you basically have to stay at until someone gives up. As neither side is going to budge. Then you can do like what happened here. Let the other side think they won. Wait a year and put what you want and it would probably stand as they moved on ages ago.
there's a certain free-to-play multiplayer game I used to play that is absolutely full of cheaters. on one server some people built a base opposite me, and for a while I sat in my sniper's nest and took pot-shots at them. then suddenly they absolutely got my number (turned on their cheats) and I couldn't walk inside my base without getting headshot through walls. I tried my best to kill them but I realised that they were staying online just for the sake of killing me. so I logged off, came back on after an hour and blew their base to fucking kingdom come. wikipedia seems to be the same. people feed off the conflict, and if you just let the conflict die, eventually you can come and take the spoils unopposed
Wikipedia isn't a primary source, and it needs to be verifiable.
So by definition it's not exposing any information you can't find in other public sources.
Whether it's notable and something that should be included is another matter.
In any case, I'm saying that if you look at the articles for Madonna, Bono, Jenna Jameson, Marilyn Manson etc. you'll find their real name displayed prominently.
We can't form our own opinion in this case, as the GP is deliberately keeping the specific article in question hidden.
But in general this seems like a thing two editors could reasonably disagree about.
It's probably the case that "outing" a micro-celebrity or someone who isn't really especially well-known is sort of obnoxious. But, yeah, for especially well-known people in the spotlight (often by their own choice) there's no particular right to keep their legal name a secret.
As a matter of (English) Wikipedia policy the inclusion of personal details ("such as date of birth, home value, traffic citations, vehicle registrations, and home or business addresses") should not be supported by only public records. Proper names for those primarily known under an alias are not explicitly covered under this section, but there would be a reasonable case for exclusion.
They need something like "wikipedia adjacent" to allow for inclusionism without authority - it's not like they're limited by the size of a bound encyclopedia.
> They need something like "wikipedia adjacent" to allow for inclusionism without authority
This is called "The Web". You’re free to write whatever you want, it’s just not on Wikipedia.
> it's not like they're limited by the size of a bound encyclopedia.
No, but articles still require maintainance, so it’s false to say that just because this is "in the cloud" you can have an infinite number of articles.
I genuinely believe that deletionism is rooted in mental disorder. It comes from a similar place as neurotic clean-freak OCD. Deletionists should be given ECT, not admin accounts.
[1] https://gwern.net/inclusionism