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In Defense of Inclusionism (2011)

by gchpaco on 12/24/14, 6:07 AM with 59 comments

• by chris_wot on 12/24/14, 11:02 AM

  I am the Ta bu shi da yu who was noted in this article, and I am indeed the person who created the [citation needed] tag. I don't think the issue is deletionism, it's instead one of a total lack of respect for other editors.

  Regrettably, I probably inadvertently helped with this culture as I also started the Administrators' notice board. Never have I seen such a cesspool of controversy, beaurocracy, wiki-lawyering and frankly power hungry people. I suffer from bouts of depression, so have left and returned a few times (actually I was made admin three times), but the last time (and believe me, the very last time) I tried to contribute I noticed the complete and utter lack of civility in the place. In a naive attempt to address this I tried to propose a policy where civility would be encouraged and incivility would be discouraged.

  One of the key opponents, a user called Giano, went on the attack and I left the site - especially after I was told via email from Brad Fitzpatrick that I was unwelcome on Wikipedia.

  I thought to myself: "I spent 2 years researching and writing about the USA PATRIOT Act for this?!?" [1]

  And I left and never came back.

  But, hey, if you want to see the discouragement that an average user sees - checkout my old user page. Even though it is a user page that very clearly says I have "retired" (more like sacked) there is wall to wall templates telling me I have committed a copyright violation (like hell!), or that images or articles will be deleted, etc. [2]

  Further to this: deletionism is a massive problem. If you don't believe me, look at the GNAA article - there were 17 different attempts to delete it! [3] Of course, Jimbo Wales supported the deletion for fairly spurious reasons in 2006. [4] I await the day that my article Exploding Whales is deleted.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

  Note that I did this because of the following article:

  http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_10_14.shtml#10981190...

  2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tbsdy_lives

  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_Amer...

  4. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-November...

• by codeflo on 12/24/14, 11:15 AM

  Among the people dedicated enough to become moderators in any online community, there seems to be a large subset that is very rule-focused, exclusionist and in general difficult to reason with. It's not just Wikipedia, basically the same thing happened at StackOverflow, where all the interesting questions have been deleted, and also in several smaller online communities I used to participate in. Given enough time, those people invariably take over and destroy the community.

  Reddit sort of avoids this because it's so easy to create new subreddits that people can vote with their feet if a moderator is behaving unreasonably. Maybe a similar solution could work for Wikipedia, having sub-Wikipedias with different rules. But that would require the current powers to admit that there's a problem, which is unlikely to happen.

• by mjn on 12/24/14, 3:39 PM

  In recent years (say, the past 4-6), imo inclusionists have actually more or less won on the "notability" question. Nowadays "verifiability" tends to trump it: if you can write a well-referenced article, this is taken as ipso facto proof of its notability also. I tend to write articles almost exclusively on obscure subjects, but with solid references, and my articles as a result don't get deleted. The trouble comes more when it's difficult to cite good sources. But if it's difficult to cite good sources, the whole Wikipedia model, which is dependent on citing good sources, breaks down: even if an article were allowed, there'd be nothing suitable to put in it. There are definitely articles I thought of writing but didn't, because I couldn't find good sources on the subject.

  In some cases I think the real fix is outside Wikipedia: if "the literature" (books, magazines, newspapers, journals, other encyclopedias, etc.) have not yet covered a subject, the first order of business is to fix that gap. But I don't think Wikipedia is the right place to go about fixing it. IMO Wikipedia makes most sense with somewhat limited ambition: to summarize the existing literature, with references. That's already a pretty large endeavor, especially when you include summarizing the existing literature globally and multilingually. When the existing literature itself is lacking, I think that should also be fixed, but not by Wikipedia.

  Once the problem is fixed in "the literature", it's then much easier to fix it in Wikipedia. For example I sometimes look at the MIT Press new-books list, or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy new-articles list, and write at least short new Wikipedia articles on subjects that they cover which Wikipedia doesn't yet cover. For me at least, that "source-first" subject selection tends to be the most relaxing way to write on Wikipedia: instead of picking a subject you want to cover and then finding sources, find good sources and ask, "what do these cover that Wikipedia doesn't?". That way of working has a good impedance match to Wikipedia's goal of being a sources-cited summary of the existing literature.

  I wrote something more long-winded on that subject a bit ago: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...

• by Torgo on 12/24/14, 6:31 PM

  I mostly quit contributing because of the deletionists, but I have some recollection about one of the "alienated" communities the article mentions. For a while there was a concerted attempt by multiple webcomic authors to insert references to their webcomic in seemingly as many articles as possible. So you would get edits for example to the ISS: "$CRAPPY_WEBCOMIC mentioned the International Space Station on January 8, 2007 when $WEBCOMIC_CHARACTER bought a telescope and $IRRELEVANT_TEXT". While I didn't care that much if every webcomic got an article, they were basically using Wikipedia as advertising and would get into fights when you tried to make it not advertising. After a while you start identifying "problem communities" and start treating those contributions less charitably.

• by SwellJoe on 12/24/14, 12:57 PM

  I used to edit things at WikiPedia now and then. Mostly grammar fixes, formatting fixes, errors in tables, etc. I haven't done it in a long time, as I felt kinda overwhelmed with the bureaucracy of the thing. I don't really have a problem with CAPTCHA (I run it on my own sites), or with the anti-spam measures (I use a bunch of anti-spam tools on my sites, and they occasionally trip up legitimate users). I understand those things, and hate spam more than most. I'm always OK with knocking out spam.

  But, the people making the decisions are occasionally just ornery. I seem to recall trying to straighten out some errors about Open Source stuff I work on, and having it reverted and moved around, sometimes in ways that simply made things confusing (removing pages and redirecting to related but different projects), etc. It's been years, but it was frustrating, and I just kinda gave up. I don't have an interest in territorial battles.

  I might give it another shot some time. I've switched our documentation wiki for Webmin to MediaWiki a few weeks ago, so I'm back up to speed on MediaWiki markup, so that's less of a barrier for me these days (never was a huge barrier, except for a few of the special stuff, like info boxes and automatically updating stuff). I'd be interested to see if these complaints have been taken to heart by folks involved...it's a drum that's been beaten for some time by a variety of long-time contributors.

• by jacquesm on 12/24/14, 10:59 AM

  It's a pity that it came to this. Wikipedia is one of the great achievements of the web community. Is there a way to recover all the deleted pages and to review them according to a newew policy, then fork wikipedia and revive those pages? It may be hard to get independent contributions to such a fork but you could do a periodical 'git rebase' to keep it current.

• by gbog on 12/24/14, 1:38 PM

  I didn't see mentioned the possibility that the number of topics is finite, and therefore the number of new pages created per day must slow down someday. We live in a world were the main assumption is that everything is infinite, but that's possibly wrong.

• by tokenadult on 12/24/14, 7:23 PM

  The new Deletionpedia[1] (kindly linked in another comment in this thread) doesn't operate the same way as the old (now non-functional) Deletionpedia,[2] which showed just how much cruft has been inserted into Wikipedia over the years. A better glimpse of current practice in inserting advertising spam cruft into user-edited wikis is offered by browsing random pages on the speedy deletion wiki of Wikia,[3] which will show how much sheer unpaid advertising goes on when people think they can get away with it.

  The weekly list of the 5,000 most viewed pages on Wikipedia[4] (which includes one page that I improved from a frequently edit-warred stub to a stable good article by adding dozens of references to reliable sources to it) shows what users are often looking for on Wikipedia. Some topics are seasonal, and others are perennial. Many Wikipedians could best help the world by fixing one of the perennial highly viewed articles until it is a good article or a featured article.

  Basis of knowledge: I have been a Wikipedian since 2010. I have seen a lot of readers get burned by articles edited on the principle of "Wikipedia is the encyclopedia where anyone can make stuff up.™" Articles become better and edit wars are reduced when people come to the project with reliable sources[5] to build an encyclopedia.[6]

  [1] http://deletionpedia.org/en/Main_Page

  [2] http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php

  [3] http://speedydeletion.wikia.com/wiki/Speedy_deletion_Wiki

  [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pag...

  [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable...

  [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Here_to_build_an_enc...

• by liotier on 12/24/14, 8:55 PM

  If you support inclusionism, please consider joining the Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Inclusionist_W...

• by fsk on 12/26/14, 11:53 PM

  That is one nice thing about the Internet - Right To Leave.

  If Wikipedia is being rude and alienating users, then people will leave. Eventually something else will come along and take their place.

• by Animats on 12/24/14, 7:20 PM

  Summary: Wikipedia keeps deleting my anime cruft. Waah!

  Of course Wikipedia editorship is declining. Most of the important articles were written years ago. Encyclopedias, over time, move to maintenance mode, which requires far less work than original creation.

  There's also a growing self-promotion problem. Self-promotion used to be mostly from garage bands. Now, it's businessmen. There are at least four rich ex-cons with paid Wikipedia editors. Businesses trying to make some big legal mess disappear are the worst. Magnetix and Banc De Binary were huge headaches. Volunteers have to push back against that, or Wikipedia becomes PR Newswire.