<i>You can literally read these requirements as "some big mega corp my grandma might encounter has mentioned it."</i><p>This is spot on. I had to engage in a <i>battle</i> on Wikipedia to keep the page up for dream hampton. Not everyone knows who she is, but she was the editor for The Source at one time, and ghost wrote Jay-Z's autobiography, among other things.<p>What I ran into is that Wikipedia basically demands that you get published in these megacorp publications that are basically all run by rich white people, and mostly men. So being written about in black publications, which tend to be more magazines and online publications, and less Library of Congress kind of stuff, doesn't cut it according to Wikipedia's notability "guidelines". If the white editors don't recognize the publication names, they don't "count".<p>The fact is, if she had been editor of Rolling Stone, I don't think there would've been a problem.<p>There were other factors too... being an editor and ghostwriter means she's more behind the scenes, and less likely to get outright exposure in the press. But that, too, is a requirement that I think turns Wikipedia into an amplifier of power, rather than a distributor of one.<p>I'm not sure if there was some outright racism going on too. I mean, she was mentioned in the New York Times and people were still calling for her page removal. At that point things start to get a little murky for me. But the situation was fishy for sure.
Thanks, Zed. A typically balanced, well-researched and well-thought-out solution to a complex problem. I especially liked the part where you blamed all of Wikipedia for the actions of a single user.<p>I wish you had considered the route of getting involved instead. There are just some basic, fundamental things that would help fix this. A modification to the notability rules would require a lot less effort than your other proposals. The notability rules work pretty well for kicking out useless chaff like pages about high school garage bands that have never played a show. But they do privilege old-school publishing and broadcasting, so particularly ephemeral creations like new programming languages may fare very poorly against the notability criteria. But this strikes me as fixable.<p>Programmers can help too. We don't even have the capability, for instance, for people to be emailed when their favorite page is up for deletion. We don't have a lot of means for casual involvement; everything depends on logging into Wikipedia regularly. This is part of why battles in Wikipedia tend to be won by the most, shall we say, persistent.<p>I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, as a programmer. In general our resources are stretched pretty thin, and there's really only been two years so far of a budget that's even remotely in line with the size and impact of the site (thanks to your contributions). In a lot of ways we're still playing catchup with an explosive period of growth that happened around 2006-2007, using technology that's getting a bit venerable.<p>But the issue of deletionism and the general community demeanor is a problem that is occupying more and more of our attention. If it matters to you then contact me. I can definitely tell you there are lots and LOTS of ways to help out.<p>Actually you could even get PAID to fix this problem. Want a job working here? We have lots of open technical positions. <a href="http://bit.ly/WikimediaJobs" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/WikimediaJobs</a><p>The one thing I can't guarantee is that it will satisfy your need to rage. The truth is, almost everyone in the Wiki community is acting in good faith. What they need are a) your input as a knowledgeable person about how policies need to change, and b) your technical and design skills, to create systems that avoid these communication breakdowns, and guide volunteers to be more effective.
<i>Let's put aside the insanely weird idea that one person has the ability to derail the creation of information unilaterally, without a vote, and without any oversight to focus on the real problem...</i><p>Jesus, does Zed Shaw live on another planet? I've never edited a Wikipedia article in my life and even I know that when an article is nominated for deletion, there's a big hullabaloo where everyone votes and argues about it before it's actually deleted.<p>Also:<p><i>It's sort of impossible to say that the Esoteric programming languages page should not have a description of every "notnotable" programming language.</i><p>I do not think "impossible" means what you think it means.
This year I donated 50€ for the worthy cause of Wikipedia. One of my arguing points was that there is a lot of obscure information I am sometimes looking for that there is no reference of - except for Wikipedia.<p>Jimbo put your dog on a leash, or next year, when your bambi eyed face gazes into me from my monitor, I will send a turd in a bag instead of a donation.<p>Does anyone know what address I could/should send my complaint to for maximum impact?
The notability requirements do not exist for a technical reason. That’s entirely wrong. Maintainability is the reason. The space is not limited but the time of people working on those articles. The goal is for Wikipedia to only have articles of a high quality, the more articles there are the harder that gets.<p>I’m not trying to defend the notability rules (I think that they are quite often pretty stupid), I’m only saying that it is completely and utterly wrong to claim that Wikipedia’s notability rules exist for a technical reason.
Plan A doesn't work. It is actually easier to delete things from pages than deleting pages themselves. If you edit war over it you will lose.<p>Plan B does not work. Wikipedia guidelines do not consider self-published sources as 'reliable' and things published by Lulu are considered self-published. Wikipedia does not consider itself a reliable source either. It is also not going to disappear in a puff of logic like God in hhgttg, no matter how witty you think it is.<p>Plan C has not worked in the years of people deleting things that appeal to far broader audiences than esoteric programming languages. They are still around. How well do you think this will work?<p>Plan D is something many people have done. In a way, Wikia is a giant example of it. In other cases they go to wikinfo or create their own wiki.<p>This post is exactly like 100s of others that someone writes whenever Wikipedia deletes (or even tries to delete) something that they care about. The ground is well-tread and it brings nothing new or interesting to the table. The internet does not need another blog post where someone spends an hour in isolation writing about it.<p>On an irrelevant note, mediawiki does support subpages (the slashes), but articles cannot have them as article titles may contain slashes. This has absolutely nothing to do with Wikipedia's notation of notability and the reasons people try to get rid of non-notable content.
Notability requirements for an article to exist at all is the wrong approach.<p>Instead, wikipedia should allow most any article to be added, but have one or more groups that "certify" articles as notable. People who want to avoid all the non-notable clutter can then elect a view of wikipedia that only includes articles certified by the group (or groups) they choose, while non-notable articles can still be viewed by those who choose to view them, and can have the breathing room to in some cases evolve into notable articles.
It seems the notability requirements really serve Wikipedia's own notability. It can't say "we'll take our list of topics from Encyclopedia Britannica" but it's what it would like to do.<p>In the beginnings it actually made sense, too, since it would never have took off if every page was about Joe Schmo's cat.<p>But now that Wikipedia is probably more famous and more well known than any other "real world" encyclopedia, such "respectability hacks" are unneeded and should be repelled.
I think the key here is that Wikipedia's notability requirements really only apply to people, publications, and events. For some things, for example the article on esoteric programming languages, it doesn't really make sense to talk about notability.
Zed writes: "I have registered notnotable.com... Just put up the same software, get some free hosting from some of the companies out there that I know, and start filling it in with anything that's not on Wikipedia."<p>There've been a few abortive attempts to create a repository for deleted Wikipedia content, or a more inclusionist Wikipedia with the same software... and they've all proved moribund.<p>The trick is not just the name or concept, but the entire community and mission. Reusing the same software – while attractive for a quick start – could present problems. Part of the reason Wikipedia has resorted to deletionism, in my mind, has been weaknesses in MediaWiki, and having the same general appearance and workflow is likely to just walk a new project down the same paths. And defining an alternative solely as "what Wikipedia isn't" puts a rather hard and low cap on its growth as an independent identity.<p>With these problems in mind, I've started working on a reference knowledge-base to complement Wikipedia that will loosen the 'notability' requirement in favor of 'true and useful'. Otherwise, it will share the same licensing and a wiki-centric edit model.<p>The project codename is 'Infinithree' ('∞³'), and I'm discussing it pre-launch at <a href="http://infinithree.org" rel="nofollow">http://infinithree.org</a> and (Twitter/Identica) @infinithree.
<i>puts on conspiracy cap</i><p>wikipedia <i>was</i> a huge threat to traditional information sources, but now something has to come from one of those traditional sources to be considered legitimate info. problem solved.
The donations thing just made me wonder if it could work to have donations per page. That is, you could kind of adopt an article (and get a banner on that article announcing you are the sponsor, perhaps).<p>Immediate problem would of course be advertising, which would not be desired.<p>It's just that if I donate now, I feel as if I am supportive of their deletionist policies, which I am not.
Strange that e.g. several content farms are deemed notable by the Wikipedia editors:<p><pre><code> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softpedia
</code></pre>
Notability requirements are fine, but not if they are applied selectively.
That's just... wrong. Come on, Zed, at least do your homework. Chris isn't deleting the pages, nor is he acting as some sort of sole determinant of noteworthiness. He's simply proposing them for deletion through the Articles for Deletion process. Also, Wikipedia handles sub-pages just fine. Most active editors have a number of sub-pages on their userpage, and many articles have sub-pages as well where people will store drafts while working on a revision. Your information is wrong, and your tone is insulting. Cut it out, man.
In case anyone is still curious how this got resolved, Monsanto gave up. From his wikipedia user page (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto</a>):<p>> Dear internet,<p>> You guys win. I will stop nominating pages for deletion.<p>> I wasn't doing this to troll or to slam any language community. I was just trying to help -- I read the WP guidelines for inclusion, and whenever I came across a language that didn't seem to meet said criteria, I nominated it for AfD. I think, with respect to Wikipedia's established notability guidelines, my arguments for deletion were airtight, which is probably why the articles were eventually deleted. I'm not sure my actions warranted the kind of internet-hatred I received as a result. If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue. Few took this route, and I am sorry that due to time constraints and an overwhelming amount of invective I could not reply sensibly to everyone.<p>> Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop. I personally think a lot of the articles should have been deleted. I think that ALL articles I nominated for deletion fail to meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages? Otherwise, some other naive editor will eventually try to delete them. Perhaps they won't have as much experience dealing with trolls and flamebait as I have had, and will become very hurt and confused. Nobody wants that :(
You could always create an esoteric languages wiki of your own if you were all fired up about it (I work at wikia, and that's the service we provide, we have 170,000 wikis on various subjects, using the same software! Founded by the same guy!)<p>But that's not really the point here. It's just because it's wikipedia that everyone gets all weird about it. The information is out there, I don't see why it's so important that every esoteric project have a wikipedia.org page. It's not supposed to be a compendium of ALL human knowledge, it's an encyclopedia of generally useful knowledge. There has to be SOME criteria for excluding stuff. There's already a problem with wikipedia containing way too many pages about nerd topics and not enough information about the rest of the world.
Wikipedia deletionism has nothing to do with the lack of paths. Organization is handled by mediawiki's category feature. Name collisions are avoided and similar names collected on disambiguation pages.<p>"Plan A" is not a new idea, it's exactly what happens to other categories with lots of items that don't deserve their own page.<p>"Plan B" won't work because part of deletionist policy is to ignore sources published by self-publishing outfits, because "anybody can publish there".<p>"Plan C" won't solve a goddamn thing. Good luck with "Plan D".<p>Quit asking for features that already exist.
<i>Plan B ¶Put out a yearly publication on Lulu.com … This publication is then a legit secondary source by a real publisher…</i><p>Uh... <i>nope</i>.<p>Hey, I have an idea! Let's publish suggestions like this to a blog and purport for it to be sound, so then it can be picked up by quacks who have an agenda to push in a bunch of <i>completely unrelated</i> situations. (Think vaccine scare pushers or those looking for self-promotion, who already exist in abundance on Wikipedia). Yeah! Let's <i>all</i> eschew with stuff like a "nuanced understanding".<p>Whether you are for or against this instance of deletionism, Shaw's plan B here wouldn't successfully legitimize anything of any subject matter, <i>and that's a good thing</i>.