This post is non-notable.

[packbat]

"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 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 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.

Comments

[kirabug.livejournal.com]

When it first started, Wikipedia was fascinating. But these days it's good only for when you want to go get some rough idea of how something works or who someone was. Almost every article I do look at has a "this is up for debate" disclaimer. It should be hard to delete something in the encyclopedia -- especially a theoretically infinitely-sized encyclopedia -- unless it's illegal or wrong. Wikipedia's fundamentally flawed as long as its design allows for easy deletion. I'm with you on it.

[kirabug.livejournal.com]

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.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

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.

[kirabug.livejournal.com]

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.

[kirabug.livejournal.com]

*snicker* plus it allows for comics like today's Sheldon (http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/070114.html).

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Ha!