> On the other hand, no-one has yet come up with a way to monetize a topic like Pseudoneuroterus mazandarani or use it to push a contentious point of view. Hence articles about species and populated places are generally not deleted, even if the topic is only weakly sourced
This is not why this happens on Wikipedia; sourcing is a factor, but notability derived from the nature and quality of the cited sources is the most commonly used criteria to delete articles.
For example, Wikipedia once had a notability guideline that a person who completed in a sport at the international level was probably notable, so a weakly sourced article on, say, a footballer with a single international cap could be notable enough to avoid deletion.
But then editors removed this guideline and fell back onto the general notability guideline (GNG), which is much stricter for people: substantial biographical coverage from reliable mainstream sources at the national level. Match reports don't count (too routine), no local interviews (too primary), no enthusiast publications (not reliable enough), etc.
Of course, this meant that hundreds of stubs and dozens of full articles about women's international footballers would never meet GNG due to a relative lack of mainstream media coverage, even if they won a World Cup. So all it took was one editor to decide to do almost nothing but flag hundreds such articles since the opening of the Women's World Cup this summer, almost all of which were deleted.
So it's not this reason that keeps moths and places:
> On the other hand, no-one has yet come up with a way to monetize a topic like Pseudoneuroterus mazandarani or use it to push a contentious point of view.
But rather, very different standards of notability are why there are more low-traffic articles on items and places that can't sue Wikipedia editors for libel.
It's really funny - just this morning I was reading the Wikipedia article for Interstate 94, which led me to the WikiProject that maintains it (US Roads) and an open letter they wrote a month ago that they were leaving Wikipedia and starting their own wiki, because of how painful it's been having their articles deleted due to arbitrary notability guidelines.
A couple points on their complaints: you _can_ cite primary sources, but you can't _rely_ on them. That's beyond notability altogether. It's still relevant to why Roads would want to fork (there aren't a lot of news publications doing feature stories on random highways) but it comes down to informal nonenforcement giving way to a few hardasses flagging everything they can as soon as their attention is turned toward a particular domain.
Because there's very little effort required to flag articles for deletion, and the burden to keep is often on the contributors doing research on a 7-day timeframe if there are even just one or two editors supporting deletion, most times the contributors eventually give up running the research treadmill and the content gets deleted anyway.
And WP:GEOROAD is a subject-specific notability guideline, like WP:NSPORT is. Those aren't immutable; NSPORT was fundamentally changed in 2022,[1] and those changes now justify all these deletions of international footballer articles created before. If the Roads editors have all left, there'll be little or no opposition to changing WP:GEOROAD,[2] and deletions of that content from WP could get done even faster.
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(geo... - and I see some of the editors who participated in NSPORT-related deletions this summer also in there advocating to change GEOROAD and make it more explicitly defer to GNG, and therefore easier to delete articles.
> Because there's very little effort required to flag articles for deletion, and the burden to keep is often on the contributors doing research on a 7-day timeframe if there are even just one or two editors supporting deletion, most times the contributors eventually give up running the research treadmill and the content gets deleted anyway.
Pretty much sums up the problem with every community-run moderated site. It directly leads to the downfall because contributors get discouraged and leave, and eventually all that's left is people with the same view as the heavy-handed moderators. Having hours of work wiped out from editors/moderators who've spent less than a minute on it sucks.
As much as I think that Wikipedia notability guidelines are way too strict, I'm wondering -- is it necessarily a bad thing for editor communities to split off and create separate specialized wikis? As long as the other wikis are also under a free license (here, CC BY-SA 4.0), you can always import back the articles into Wikipedia. So maybe it can be a useful way for communities to "incubate" articles?
Indeed it's not a bad thing at all. I remember in the early days of wikipedia it seemed like every single Pokemon had their own article while actually notable real life topics had scant information.
Migrating all that cruft to a separate pokemon wiki was an improvement for everyone, no matter how "notable" you think Beedrill might be, it doesn't need it's own separate wikipedia article. With a separate wiki, Pokemon fans can go into as much depth and lore as they like.
Personally I think the criteria for fictional things should be even stronger. There ought to be an article about the work of fiction itself, but not articles about fictional characters or events unless they're notable outside of the work of fiction.
This keeps wikipedia about facts, not fictional canon.
e.g. Pikachu derves a separate article, Charmander does not.
To elaborate further, the Charizard article has a "Physical characteristics" section.
It's a anime / computer game. It's not a physical being, so any "physical characteristics" is not factual information, it's fictional information. Wikipedia does a poor job at separation of fact and fiction in articles about fictional beings.
> no matter how "notable" you think Beedrill might be, it doesn't need it's own separate wikipedia article
This has always been my sticking point with deletionist thinking. Why doesn't it need it's own separate wikipedia article? What's the harm in it? Are we worried that people will start treating Charizard as a real creature?
Where I see the value of notability criteria it is mostly in preventing vanity articles. Beedrill, presumably, is of general enough interest that people are willing to contribute and reference the information. Why isn't that enough?
I wish they'd give all the fantasy stuff (character in tv show, animated character, etc) something like a different background color or theme that essentially says "this is for people who want to document fantasy worlds".
Wouldn't it make sense for Pokemon to have its own wiki? Sure have an article about the existence/history of the games and anime in Wikipedia, but such details as describing the various creatures could go elsewhere. That's how it works for other games. For example, there are articles about the various games in the Fallout series in Wikipedia, but the various creatures and locations don't have their own pages there. But there's an entire (in fact several) wikis dedicated to everything Fallout.
I mean, maybe it would make sense. But having the pages on wikipedia has a bunch of huge advantages -- not least of which is piggybacking on the ad-free nature of wikipedia. The size of the editorial community is much larger too.
The reason that there are wikis dedicated to "everything Fallout" is because of these deletionist sentiments. Most of these things started on wikipedia and had to migrate off because of the constant barrage of deletion fights.
Well, I don't like "deletionist sentiment" when the issue is "notability" -- obscure moths or Bulgarian poets have a legitimate reason to be in Wikipedia even if non-entomologists and non-Bulgarians may not care about them. But there is a real argument that fictional beings and places don't belong in a serious encyclopedia (even if the works they are from do exist and should be covered).
> But there is a real argument that fictional beings and places don't belong in a serious encyclopedia
I'll bite, though -- why the passive voice? What is the argument? The first blush here is that these topics are non-serious and make Wikipedia seem less serious. That's clearly a strawman though -- what's the deeper argument? I mean, for Brittanica, you only have so much print space you can use, and an article on Beedrill is a waste of paper. But Wikipedia is not printed; and while space is scarce in theory we shouldn't be rationing until the need it apparent.
I think fiction and non-fiction are worth keeping separate on a philosophical level. It isn't about saving space, it is about keeping reality and fantasy isolated from each other which is more important now than ever in the "post-truth" society.
I'm sure there's some very good reasons for it, but what exactly is the reason why there cannot be articles for very niche things like articles for each Pokemon individually listed on Wikipedia? I find the idea of having a complete tome of everything to be an incredibly neat idea!
At a guess, it's probably something like practical restraints around "not enough people monitoring for quality", or the fact that the hard drive space to save all of this information is not free and unlimited, or that simply, it might be better served by niche communities who will be devoted to caring far more about such specific topics?
I just find it frustrating that there isn't a kind of...ultra, super mega colossal set of all human knowledge of everything stored under a single digital roof. I suppose that ideal itself probably isn't practical for the reasons mentioned...it just seems so neat in concept. Just one place for everything.
Wikipedia articles are kinda meant to be a broad view of a subject that is approachable to a general reader with no prior knowledge. You can write an article about Pikachu or Squirtle that is relevant to this type of reader. Can you really write such an article about Dartrix or Groudon?
Granted, this is also a problem with the obscure moth species articles. I think the moth species articles survive because no one really cares enough to start the crusade against them. When we used to have every Pokemon, it was a common line in deletion discussions to say "well if every Pokemon has an article, why can't <my obscure topic> have one too?" -- I think some people eventually got fed up and decided it was worth putting in the work of figuring out what the notability standards should be. What I've learned from a long time of editing on Wikipedia is that often, things are the way they are not because it's the best way, but because the project has a lot of inertia -- it's a lot of work to make a big change happen.
The concept you long for sounds a little bit like Wikidata. It's much less in-depth than Wikipedia, and just describes its subjects as structured data instead of with prose, but the notability bar on Wikidata is much much lower. Every Pokemon, every scientific article, every book, every village, every athlete, etc is generally in scope.
Please don't give the deletionists ideas. I treasure the ability to look up Victaphanta compacta and find real information, regardless of how approachable the topic of the Otways Black Snail is.
In my handful of encounters trying to contribute to wikipedia it's always been such a frustrating experience.
"not enough people monitoring for quality" is one way to put it, but I've often found it to be one very zealous person monitoring for their idea of quality. It ends up quite frustrating, especially if you're a domain expert.
I've corrected articles where things I've written have been cited and had the changes reverted. It was enough to just give up.
> I've corrected articles where things I've written have been cited and had the changes reverted. It was enough to just give up.
I've heard about this happening enough that I stopped treating WP with any credibility whatsoever even for what should be cut & dry fact (aka: non-controversial/political topics). I've heard of people who were being quoted updating the context to more accurately reflect what they were saying and having the changes reverted. As if the person who said the thing being quoted doesn't know what they meant. Often because it didn't meet some guideline or another but more often than not because one overzealous editor has decided that the page being edited is "their page".
I learn the truth more from perusing the edit history or talk pages than from ever reading the page itself. Also despite claims of neutrality it's amazing how often pro-communist articles are heavily maintained almost exclusively by diehard self-proclaimed Marxists making politically biased edits.
Kings of their own tiny virtual mountains. I tried once to update the Wikipedia article about my own military unit, just to update for our new location after a move and some other details about our heraldry. Basically, I was told/ordered to update it by the CO. No luck. Changes were repeatedly reversed by whatever kid/editor didn't want anyone else in thier sandbox. It remains incorrect to this day.
>As if the person who said the thing being quoted doesn't know what they meant.
What they meant at the time they said it and what they want it to mean later upon reflection, certainly could be two completely different things and should be scrutinized.
For political things sure. Now imagine you're explaining how something works on a technical level - like the physics of how induction heating works or the summary of a study where they've twisted your summary to claim the opposite of what the study and your summary actually claims. You go to correct their misinterpretation of your study and are told you are wrong and your edit reverted.
It's really not a bad idea, but the problem is structuring.
It's odd but I come back to Cantrill's "Fork Yeah" talk here.
So the basic problem is one of resources: forked wikis still have hosting costs, so they need either a patron community (often just one person) or a for-profit company (with lots of crappy ads), while Wikipedia by all accounts is rolling in the dough with very little accountability (i.e. when professors and teachers remind students "don't believe 100% of what you read on Wikipedia," the-Wiki-community is blamed moreso than Wikipedia-the-nonprofit). If you fork Wikipedia then you lose out on the resources.
Without that, you do have a "forkophobic" culture which is why you get this "governance orgy" -- the notability guidelines and so forth. But the difference is, Cantrill's software examples expect the software to have some sort of editorial control, so if the Linux or Apache foundations take on some project it's because it's used by thousands or millions of people and they don't really take kindly to "oh yeah upstream was vandalized by someone who came in and just made every request to the Apache server return 'HTTP 499 BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS'."
In Wikipedia you get this strange direct democracy by "whoever happened to show up." Deletion votes are often done with like, 20 votes or less of just random passersby. Worse, those random passersby are usually the people who visited the article in the first place and saw that it was up for deletion, so they'll say things that are nonsensical like "oh, he's a very notable figure in the XYZ community, Googling him turns up 40,000 results so clearly he is notable."
> In Wikipedia you get this strange direct democracy by "whoever happened to show up." Deletion votes are often done with like, 20 votes or less of just random passersby.
20! That'd be a luxury.
Here are some of those footballer AfDs from this month that passed with 1 vote on top of the nomination. Without passing any judgment on whether the subjects are notable, see if you notice any participation trends:
> Deletion votes are often done with like, 20 votes or less of just random passersby.
You don't even need that. IIRC, the "PROD" process can get an article deleted with no votes at all. All you have to do is tag the article and if no one removes it for a week, it will be deleted with no further discussion.
The caveats are you can only PROD something once, and I believe no discussion is required to delete a PROD'ed article (if anyone remembers it to want to bring it back).
It's not a bad thing in concept, and probably won't be a bad thing in execution since Roads has a pretty solid core of editors moving. They've already implemented technical improvements on AARoads, like better and newer road maps. The potential is there.
It's often a bad thing in practice, much like how splitting off entirely separate social networks for specific subjects is often a bad idea. If there aren't enough people or activity, interest wanes. If the project relies on one or two heavily active editors, it collapses when they're unavailable. If you never hit critical mass for SEO or can't/don't know how to promote your content, all the work is done in a vacuum and everyone sees the Wikipedia stubs over your stuff anyway.
Fandom (as in the company), as awful as it is, largely exists by virtue of participation in the subjects where there's enough interest to facilitate it; the mass wiki-farm infrastructure gives them enough of a SEO boost to dominate even some of the wikis that fork off of Fandom to escape its policies.
> you can always import back the articles into Wikipedia. So maybe it can be a useful way for communities to "incubate" articles?
Developing an article on a separate wiki has additional technical and administrative overhead.
CC BY-SA requires attribution. Wikipedia attributes contributions by article history. The only way to import article history is via Special:Import. You have to be an admin or have import rights to use Special:Import on Wikipedia.
If you can clear all those hurdles, then in theory you can import changes with the required attribution from another wiki. But if the imported changes conflict with changes made in parallel on Wikipedia, resolving them can be very contentious, especially if any of the editors involved disagree on the resolution. Or the import might fail, because Special:Import isn't particularly robust.
And as the forked wiki admin, do you decide to set up scheduled imports _from_ Wikipedia to keep up with upstream? These forks often split because Wikipedia is deficient in some way beyond just editing the text. AARoads' fork's use of improved maps, for instance, would probably break the article on Special:Import because it looks like they use different wiki templates and modules.
If the Wikimedia foundation spent its immense donation income on supporting those specialized wikis - something far more appropriate to the spirit in which it was given than what it actually gets spent on - then I'd agree with you. But in practice these other wikis are generally struggling to keep the lights on and resort to advertising, and then the censorship that follows from that.
I had to fight a bit with other editors to convince them that this guy was notable. He had coverage in Polygon and Kotaku, so that seemed enough to me, but it was a difficult task at first.
Is some dude who pushes buttons very quickly notable?
The primary thing that establishes general notability on Wikipedia for biographies is significant coverage from reliable secondary sources independent from both each other and the subject.
If someone gets significant coverage from multiple reliable secondary sources for taking a shit, they can have a Wikipedia article. They don't have to win an award for it (though it'd help) or contribute to society (though it'd help).
The action itself might be broadly, by common sense, not notable. Only the notoriety of the person _in published sources_ is relevant.
>reliable mainstream sources at the national level
And does anyone actually believe this is applied consistently?
I'm willing to bet that there are countless Wikipedia articles about people in technical, academic, local political, etc., etc. roles/positions that wouldn't meet that criterion.
Of course it’s not 100% consistent, just like any rule in any project where tens of thousands of people work together. That’s what makes Wikipedia great: you don’t have to get your article validated by some random comitee of 20 persons; you just read the rules and try to respect them. It won’t be perfect, but you can always ask someone with more experience to review the article.
No Wikipedia policy is applied consistently. They're applied when editors want to apply them to justify a decision. That's how every individual decision on Wikipedia works; precedent doesn't even apply.
nope, but that's the neat part (well, neat in the "morbidly scary" sort of way). They don't need to. If a topic is niche enough there won't be enough wiki editors well versed enough to argue for nor against the obviously asinine requirements. they can quash women's football for lacking a national mainstream source but then pull out some esoteric source for their own pet project uninhibited (again, assuming the topic is niche enough to go under the "mainstream editor" radar).
Thank you for this answer. The only thing I'd add is that Wikipedia is not a monolithic entity, and whilst you're probably referring to English Wikipedia (not unreasonable, given this is HN), my understanding is that other versions of Wikipedia have their own, sometimes quite different notability requirements.
Wikipedia's notability guidelines have been too tight for a very long time. I remember being flabbergasted that highly popular webcomics couldn't get a wiki article.
I remember reading an accusation from someone upset about a page deletion that the notability guidelines are so tight in order to drive traffic to Fandom. At the time I thought it was absurd, but I find myself wondering about that a lot.
WMF has had nothing to do with Wikia/Fandom for years (apparently they shared some hosting costs back in 2009). Jimmy Wales also hasn't exerted control over Wikipedia policy in a long time, and as of this year no longer even nominally has the right to overrule ArbCom.
So at the very least that's not actively motivating the continued state of the notability guidelines, though I don't know if it's possible the original motivation was as you suggest.
Yes, and that was what I myself thought as I scrolled past.
"Jimmy Wales also hasn't exerted control over Wikipedia policy in a long time, and as of this year no longer even nominally has the right to overrule ArbCom."
Except these two facts niggle.
He's on the board, and will always be the founder. He is SV aristocracy in a town where the money you earn is less important than the people you know and the things you have built. He will always have influence and it's naive to believe he wouldn't. So, it is not entirely accurate to say he has no control, just less control than he did. Is it too little control? Perhaps, perhaps not.
If I wanted to construct a set of policies that drove traffic to another site, I would make them quite like Wikipedia has now e.g. Wikipedia is not a gamers manual. Then I would target for deletion much of the nerd content, quite like now. This is quite a coincidence.
I'm not attached to this theory. Also, I don't like spreading negativity. But to me it seems at least somewhat plausible, and that possibility disturbs me a little.
I don't believe this is actually enforced. I created a small website called "Man of the Hour", which filtered Wikipedia with the Wikidata code Q8441 (man - male adult human), selected a random entry every hour, and displayed it.
I would go there a few times a day, and noticed that almost every single article it gave me was some random amateur athlete, with only a results page as a source.
I gave an example of enforcement. It takes an editor to flag the article for deletion. Chances are, like the women's footballer stubs up until an editor decided to go through all of them, there hasn't been an editor motivated to do so.
To say the quiet part out loud: It only takes one misogynist to go out of their way to flag hundreds of pages of women athletes. No one is out there flagging men's pages to delete for the same reasons.
I was at an early Wikipedia meetup and a woman editor told me that women porn stars were more likely to get (and keep) a profile page than a woman sci-fi author. It's pretty clear that Wikipedia's quality has been diminished by this level of misogyny.
There's a part of that, but the women's stubs are also unjustifiable because of the foundational mandates around sourcing and notability.
Once upon a time, subject-specific notability guidelines carved out exceptions by arbitrarily defining typical notability for a given subject at a lower standard than general notability. Those exceptions are being rolled back toward the higher bar of general notability.
When a women's sport gets 1/10th the mainstream coverage of the men's equivalent, there's no policy justification to have articles under general notability. Even if Wikipedia was capable of banning every editor whose focus is in deleting articles about women (and it's sincerely not capable of banning any of them), the core policies themselves would justify not creating articles — especially for almost all who played in the decades before the recent boom in coverage and investment — because the coverage wasn't and isn't there.
The issue here not specifically notability or a lack of articles. In most cases someone could find the sources but they would need to do so really quickly while flagging hundreds of pages is trivial for an editor with a grudge.
It’s that time pressure gives a great deal of power to anyone with an agenda of any kind.
The comparison wasn't notable male athletes versus non-notable female athletes. It was non-notable male athletes versus non-notable female athletes. The observation that male sports is more popular, while true, is a non-sequitur.
Wikipedia's misogyny is built into its policies, notably the pernicious effects of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS:IDINFO and how they punish anyone who dissents from this.
So for example, per this policy, it's impossible to rewrite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Rivers to point out the angle of male violence against women, despite there being sources that exist discussing this, because it's forbidden by policy to refer to this male as a male or use sources that describe him as a man. Instead, the pretence that this is the crime of a woman has to be maintained.
So you think that because wikipedia guidelines are intolerant of intolerance and don't fit with your personal (bigoted) opinions on trans people that means they are misogynist?
This is not why this happens on Wikipedia; sourcing is a factor, but notability derived from the nature and quality of the cited sources is the most commonly used criteria to delete articles.
For example, Wikipedia once had a notability guideline that a person who completed in a sport at the international level was probably notable, so a weakly sourced article on, say, a footballer with a single international cap could be notable enough to avoid deletion.
But then editors removed this guideline and fell back onto the general notability guideline (GNG), which is much stricter for people: substantial biographical coverage from reliable mainstream sources at the national level. Match reports don't count (too routine), no local interviews (too primary), no enthusiast publications (not reliable enough), etc.
Of course, this meant that hundreds of stubs and dozens of full articles about women's international footballers would never meet GNG due to a relative lack of mainstream media coverage, even if they won a World Cup. So all it took was one editor to decide to do almost nothing but flag hundreds such articles since the opening of the Women's World Cup this summer, almost all of which were deleted.
So it's not this reason that keeps moths and places:
> On the other hand, no-one has yet come up with a way to monetize a topic like Pseudoneuroterus mazandarani or use it to push a contentious point of view.
But rather, very different standards of notability are why there are more low-traffic articles on items and places that can't sue Wikipedia editors for libel.