However, this unfortunate mess points to problems with various Wikipedia policies, including the inability of most companies, organizations and topics to have Wikipedia pages unless they are created by unbiased parties citing established mass media sources or scholarship.
Regardless of its size or stature, if the organization/company/topic has never generated press coverage, and if no neutral editors care enough about it to create an article, then there won't be any article ... or eventually the Wikipedia police will delete it.
Note that Wikipedia guidelines(1) define allowable press sources as substantial coverage, not a passing reference. A blog or forum post written by a knowledgeable user doesn't count, while an article written by a reporter talking with a company's PR team will.
It turns out this story is a good example for why organizations should be independently notable before being included in the encyclopedia. Read it again: the problem isn't that the author stumbled across the ICD page and thought to himself, "ICD doesn't deserve a Wikipedia page". The problem is that when the author found the ICD page, it was riddled with promotional text and carefully guarded by ICD insiders.
This is why Wikipedia has the WP:N policy. It's not that WP cares about who "deserves" to have a page. It's that WP cares that it be possible to maintain accurate encyclopedia articles, and can't hope to perform that function for non-notable organizations. WP errs on the side of caution: if you can't independently source information about a topic, keep it off the site; you won't have content about that topic, sure, but at least you won't have to worry that the content you do have is hopelessly biased or misleading.
Regarding press coverage and the standards for WP:RS sourcing: I think you're oversimplifying a little. It's true that the site is overly deferential to institutional media coverage. That frustrated me when I was participating (though it was frustrating in probably the opposite direction as you: I was regularly thwarted in getting spam scrubbed off the site by someone's citation to some crappy trade press reprint of a press release). But WP does not formally privilege institutional media; you can in fact source a topic with particularly reputable blog posts.
The one thing you cannot do is source an article with primary sources --- ie, with interviews with subject matter experts given directly to WP page authors. That's deliberate: the site is not a forum for original research; it is not itself a press venue. But that's also an easy restriction to work around: do the original research for some other venue, and cite it in the WP.
I'm not sure why you think the Wikipedia policy is wrong.
If there is no substantial third party coverage of a topic, why should Wikipedia cover it?
A lot of people seem to believe that since bits are cheap, we might as well keep around any page no matter how non-notable it is. But there is a cost to including articles beyond the storage cost. Articles need to be patrolled for vandalism, and fact checked based on material published elsewhere. If you let people just post anything they want, then people will start using it for spam, fluff pieces, random bullshit, and so on. Enough of that, and it will substantially tarnish Wikipedia's reputation as a useful and unbiased source of information.
If a person or organization has never received press coverage, academic research, or other substantial information published on them outside of Wikipedia, why should they have a Wikipedia page?
Should every Joe Blow who happened to be captain of the swim team in high school and who's now the local Rotary Club president have a Wikipedia page? Should every mom and pop pizza joint? Who gets to have the Wikipedia page for "Village Pizza"?
The only reason for these small, not otherwise notable organizations to have a Wikipedia page is to increase their perceived notability; having a Wikipedia page indicates a certain amount of fame or notoriety. So in that case, allowing not otherwise notable organizations to have Wikipedia page would basically be a way for them to get free advertising. Especially in a case like this, when the whole page was edited by people who are, apparently, closely connected to the organization in question, and who would fight any negative information placed on the page.
If there is no substantial third party coverage of a topic, why should Wikipedia cover it?
Because "substantial third-party coverage" is a flawed test for the importance of a subject.
Press coverage tends toward the sensational, visual, beautiful, controversial, current, language-specific, and easily explained. If a topic doesn't meet those criteria, it probably won't be covered by the press -- unless the topic in question has some well-connected PR firm or publicist pushing for it.
Another issue with press coverage is "established" media is contracting. There aren't as many editors assigning stories, or reporters crafting unbiased profiles of companies, organizations, topics and people. This has an significant, indirect impact on the types of topics that can be sourced according to Wikipedia's official rules.
Meanwhile, the number of self-published, user-generated sources of expert opinion is exploding. I'm talking about blogs and places like Hacker News and Reddit. Someone with deep experience and understanding of a topic can share information, yet this information can't be used, according to Wikipedia's policies.
> Because "substantial third-party coverage" is a flawed test for the importance of a subject.
Its not, really, for something that by-mission is a tertiary source. There's probably a different set of rules that ought to be in place for a publicly-contributed-to Wikijournal of Original Research (which, once it established itself as credible, could be a source cited in Wikipedia), but that's a different niche. Wikipedia does not intend to be all things to all people, it intends to be one thing and do it well.
> Press coverage tends toward the sensational, visual, beautiful, controversial, current, language-specific, and easily explained.
> Another issue with press coverage is "established" media is contracting.
"Third-party" and "press" aren't the same thing. Wikipedia, by policy, prefers academic and peer-reviewed publications.
News media publications are one of many other things that might be reliable sources in particular areas, but are not especially preferred.
> Meanwhile, the number of self-published, user-generated sources of expert opinion is exploding. I'm talking about blogs and places like Hacker News and Reddit. Someone with deep experience and understanding of a topic can share information, yet this information can't be used, according to Wikipedia's policies.
It actually can, per Wikipedia policy, if the author of the self-published source also has other work in the relevant field published in reliable, third-party publications.
> Because "substantial third-party coverage" is a flawed test for the importance of a subject.
So what? Importance of a subject is not what WP is trying to filter. Wikipedia wants to contain all the important knowledge, yes, but that's impossible to measure or agree on, so there is a set of criteria that act as a reasonable proxy, and you need to accept that the Wikipedia we've got is the one that has those filters.
So it goes something like this: content in wikipedia should be "NPOV", it should not be original research (i.e. WP aims to be a tertiary source), and content should be "verifiable". These terms in turn need to be refined, defined, given guidelines, etc. (For example, nothing is truly NPOV, so we need a way to understand how to approximate it, and for example, not all verification is equal (and nothing is perfectly verifiable), so we need guidelines again.)
And, as sibling comments have pointed out, there is NOT a preference for "press coverage" and "established media". It's one permitted alternative.
> "expert opinion ... like Hacker News and Reddit"
I assume that you were joking, or making some nuanced point that I missed, but just in case you weren't...
Listen, they let ME write comments on Hacker News and Reddit, you know. They also let experts write at such places, it's true, but how will you know the difference? Yes, there's lots of expert opinion in the world, including e.g. some on HN, but so what? Citations aren't any good if they don't bring some kind of authority, and "some guy said so on HN" is not very convincing.
There are certainly circumstances in which a comment on HN can qualify for WP:RELIABLESOURCES .
There's lots of good reading at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About , but if you're trying to "get something done" today, it's too much to read at one sitting. You've gotta just accept that, but then again you shouldn't be trying to "get something done" on wikipedia in a given day.
I agree press coverage is suboptimal. But really, press coverage is one of the lower tiers of "reliable source" from Wikipedia's perspective, and cautiously included for mostly pragmatic reasons. Ideally, articles shouldn't be based on press coverage: if you're writing an article about the history of IBM, or about World War I, you should base it on one of the many books or journal articles on the subject, not on digging up some old New York Times article. That's precisely because it's actually not always the case that whatever the NYT happened to write at the time is either accurate or a complete picture. It's better to cite a proper historical study that's done a critical analysis of the original sources instead.
But for very recent things where nobody has written anything better, newspapers are treated as an acceptable source. Ideally, they will be replaced with something else, at some later date: the Syrian War article is currently mostly sourced from newspapers, but in 30 years it really should be written with citations to major books and articles on the subject, not cobbled together from newspaper articles. There are a few exceptions; for example, longer-form magazine biopics, and newspaper obituaries, sometimes provide good longer-term sources for middle-level-fame figures who aren't well-known enough for anyone to have written books or journal articles about them.
For an internet encyclopedia to require references to dead tree sources is a failure. For example, my country haven't got any music press that isn't a joke, should it mean that no music articles should be allowed? Some of editors behave as if there shouldn't.
UPD: That's nice, somebody just came along and downvoted all our comments. I bet it was a proud wikipedia editor.
If there aren't any good third-party sources, I don't think there should be a Wikipedia article on the subject. What would it cite? How are we supposed to know it isn't just music fans writing stuff off the top of their head? The only reason Wikipedia articles are trustworthy at all is because they cite their sources, and I can follow up those citations and see what they say for myself. I have no reason to believe some random Wikipedia editor otherwise.
Overall, it's an encyclopedia with a (very) large but nonetheless delimited goal: summarizing the existing literature on as many subjects as there is existing literature. That is a lot of things, and it already seems almost absurdly ambitious to set out to summarize all of them, without trying to expand the scope further!
I also participate in projects with different goals, documenting things that aren't currently documented by existing literature. One of them is a music-related wiki project documenting an under-documented music scene. I think those kinds of projects are also worthwhile (or I wouldn't spend my time on them). But I don't see that as the same job as Wikipedia, which as a tertiary source should only be summarizing existing secondary literature, not doing its own independent investigations. I don't actually understand the motivation for why people want to merge this kind of wiki with Wikipedia, either, since it seems like a clearly different kind of activity, requiring different standards and probably a different community. Is it just that there is some cachet (whether SEO or just general prestige) to having a Wikipedia article, while there isn't the same cachet to having an article on a music-scene wiki?
I did write something [1] about the main problem area that results: stuff that is clearly notable, where you'd think sources should exist that Wikipedia could cite, but then when you look, there just isn't much solid written on the subject. This is indeed a pain point, but I'm not sure what could be done about it short of writing un-cited or very-poorly-cited articles, which I think is worse than not having an article. Not having an article is at least honest about Wikipedia's current inability to provide a well-sourced article on the subject.
> Is it just that there is some cachet (whether SEO or just general prestige) to having a Wikipedia article, while there isn't the same cachet to having an article on a music-scene wiki?
Yes. And that's exactly what's going on in the ICD case (assuming that TFA is honest). You've got a company trying to (ab)use Wikipedia for free PR, straightforwardly violating the very straightforward policies about autobiography, getting treated more-charitably than they deserve, and then resorting to legal threats when they don't get their way. What else can you say, except that Wikipedia has influence and people want to manipulate that influence for themselves?
> For an internet encyclopedia to require references to dead tree sources is a failure.
It doesn't require references to dead tree sources. Wikipedia policies -- particularly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability -- require that material be sourced to reliable, previously published sources, but does not require that those sources be "dead tree" sources.
> For example, my country haven't got any music press that isn't a joke, should it mean that no music articles should be allowed?
Not per Wikipedia policy, since no policy limits sources to the any particular country.
Reliability can be disputed. If you aren't backed by dead trees you can always be outpowered by some relentless deletionist who just would not let it go.
Well, why would other countries' sources write about our local bands?
"In Wikipedia, debates can be won by stamina. If you care more and argue longer, you will tend to get your way. The result, very often, is that individuals and organizations with a very strong interest in having Wikipedia say a particular thing tend to win out over other editors who just want the encyclopedia to be solid, neutral, and reliable"
That's why I stopped sending them money.
That and deletionism.
I used to be staunchly against deletionism, but having had more experience with exactly the above kind of page, where someone who cares a lot about some organization or topic that really isn't at all notable can go to an awful lot of trouble to create stuff that just junks up Wikipedia with biased, poorly researched and poorly cited pages, I am a lot more sympathetic to deletionism these days.
There are real costs to maintaining pages; editors need to revert vandalism, fix it to match the style guidelines, look for citations, resolve disputes, keep it neutral, ensure that it reflects a broad consensus about the actual truth of the matter, and so on. For small, insignificant topics, an article can be more trouble than it's worth.
Deletionism is like the Myers-Briggs personality types: it's not about what you do all the time, but rather the more common reflex/tendency.
Yes, there should be an upper limit; a wiki page for the sandwich I had last Thursday would go too far. But in a world of quasi-infinite storage, I think inclusionism should be the default, with a strong burden of proof required to delete.
> But in a world of quasi-infinite storage, I think inclusionism should be the default, with a strong burden of proof required to delete.
Its not about storage, its about mission. Wikipedia has a purpose. Many things do not fit that purpose (even many things for which the Wikimedia Foundation is happy to have its storage used, hence why the Foundation has other projects besides Wikipedia.)
Just because its is worth having somewhere on the internet (even in a publicly-editable place on the internet hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation) doesn't mean it belongs on Wikipedia.
There's too much stuff in WP already. Important articles have errors or poor sources. Just noodling through the important articles fixing sources and style and language is too much work.
Doing that for bus routes or every Minecraft block or whatever just invites bitrot.
That would destroy Wikipedia's utility as a reference for stuff that exists in the real world. A website should be allowed to focus on what it does best without being forced to be all things to all people.
I'm sorry they had a poor experience with editors for that institute.
Did the author forward the legal threats to the foundation? As I understand it blocks (bans?) would be put in place.
In other circumstances I'd assume good faith, and I'd suggest that the baffling maze of essays, guidelines, pillars, rules, policies, noticeboards, and discussion pages all contribute to new users feeling attacked by WP.
I do all my Wikipedia editing anonymously. That way it's hard for Wikipedians to tell me I'm doing it wrong. And since my edits are usually good, they rarely get reverted. :)
By way of contrast, I'm an official DMOZ editor, but it's been quite a while since I actually edited there. Too much hassle. Even the smallest decision is apt to turn into an entmoot. And of course, it's unclear whether there's much DMOZ usage these days anyway, by humans or search engines alike.
Most places I go online, I use my real name. I use a screen name here because I already had a habit of using the same screen name in two other online forums. I use a completely different, unique screen name on Wikipedia, as I was forewarned that editing is contentious there.
I've seen some point-of-view-pushers on Wikipedia go to elaborate lengths to look up personal information about me, to give me harassing phone calls in the middle of the night, so I guess my screen name there didn't disguise my identity sufficiently. Over the years, most of those people have been site-banned in their first and second identities, but they still have plenty of sockpuppets and meatpuppets, and the administrators are always encountering new I.P. edits in support of the same skewing of point of view in that series of articles. (The articles are under ongoing arbitration committee supervision from a case
that began hearing evidence just as I formally registered as a Wikipedian.) So I mostly wikignome on articles I happen to look up for fun, and only rarely edit articles on the subjects I actually know best and have the most sources at hand for. Wikipedia's editing atmosphere is lousy that way--the lunatics are mostly allowed to take over the asylum.
Whoa, that is pretty nuts! I've been on Wikipedia for ~10 years, and for a few years (mid-2000s) was on the arbitration committee, and never ran across anything like that, either first- or second-hand, not even for the brief period of time I was somewhat active in editing articles relating to the Israel-Palestine and Greece-Macedonia disputes. The worst I've gotten is angry emails, though even those are rare and it mostly sticks to angry talk-page messages. Perhaps I was lucky; or perhaps "race and intelligence" as a topic brings out an exceptionally insane crowd? Sounds rather unpleasant.
I mostly edit articles relating to archaeology and (pre-20th-c) history these days, and I don't really run into trouble. If anything, my main complaint is not enough other people around; parts of the encyclopedia feel like ghost towns, where you can write whatever and nobody will comment either way.
However, this unfortunate mess points to problems with various Wikipedia policies, including the inability of most companies, organizations and topics to have Wikipedia pages unless they are created by unbiased parties citing established mass media sources or scholarship.
Regardless of its size or stature, if the organization/company/topic has never generated press coverage, and if no neutral editors care enough about it to create an article, then there won't be any article ... or eventually the Wikipedia police will delete it.
Note that Wikipedia guidelines(1) define allowable press sources as substantial coverage, not a passing reference. A blog or forum post written by a knowledgeable user doesn't count, while an article written by a reporter talking with a company's PR team will.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_...