packbat: A bat wearing a big asexual-flag (black-gray-white-purple) backpack. (swing dismount)
packbat ([personal profile] packbat) wrote2007-01-12 09:08 am
Entry tags:

This post is non-notable.

"The Suburban Jungle" got deleted on Wikipedia.

Right now, I am of two feelings about Wikipedia. On the one hand, it's pretty useful for a quick reference – if I'm reading my webcomics and run into a reference to Dennis Miller, thirty seconds and I know what I need to – but at least in the past year or two, it has developed a dismaying trend towards deletion.

I'm talking to [livejournal.com profile] nanakikun about this, and he's pointed out a huge problem: the process is biased towards deletion. All articles are guilty non-notable until proven notable. To delete an article requires nothing but, "I don't see proof that this article is important" – a fellow could delete five thousand files a day, and some people do – while to relist takes, at the minimum, half an hour to track down sources per article.

I don't know why things are this way. As [livejournal.com profile] nanakikun has pointed out, you can't change anything without knowing what is going on. But something is massively broken.

The deletion review is here, by the way.

[identity profile] kirabug.livejournal.com 2007-01-14 05:17 am (UTC)(link)
Oh, and at least there's Comixpedia's wiki (http://comixpedia.org/index.php/Main_Page) which was specifically started because Wikipedia was pulling stunts like this.

[identity profile] packbat.livejournal.com 2007-01-14 02:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, I heard from Websnark. It's just that having scads of topic-specific wikis instead of a single clearinghouse is, well, not as good as it could have been.

Well, c'est la vie.

[identity profile] kirabug.livejournal.com 2007-01-14 03:24 pm (UTC)(link)
A single clearinghouse of quality information is obviously better than scads of topic-specific wikis. On the other hand, we've already seen over a few hundred years that topic-specific books tend to be better sources of information than books with a larger breadth of information (technical constraints aside). I think that while generalization is great if you just need an overview, people trust specialists more. So maybe it's for the best.

[identity profile] kirabug.livejournal.com 2007-01-14 03:41 pm (UTC)(link)
*snicker* plus it allows for comics like today's Sheldon (http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/070114.html).

[identity profile] packbat.livejournal.com 2007-01-14 04:13 pm (UTC)(link)
Ha!