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Friday, January 12th, 2007 09:08 am
"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.
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Sunday, January 14th, 2007 03:24 pm (UTC)
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.