Evicted From WikipediaWhy the online encyclopedia won't let just anyone in.

Remarks from the Fray:

There are more concerns about removing the notability criterion than just privacy and fact checking.

Go to Wikipedia and type in "John Smith". How many articles do you get? How many would you get if every John Smith--including your cleaning lady's son--had a page?

Wikis are great at collecting disparate thoughts but not at organizing them in any meaningful way. (Nor is a wiki a good tool for an encyclopedia, which should be authoritative and not collective, but that's another matter.) At a certain point that simple wiki search box, which works great with a single or a few John Smiths, becomes nearly useless as you have to sort through all kinds of unrelated entries to find what you really want.

People forget that traditional encyclopedia editors and organizations like libraries have made it easier to find the information you want by removing junk and creating pathways. "Hierarchical distinctions" DO have value because not all information is equally valuable.

--Saru

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I myself regularly participate in Article for Deletion votes on Wikipedia and I would have been very surprised if Noah's article would have been deleted in the process; user's are flexible with the application of notability standards and Noah appears to be notable enough for inclusion. Decisions of this nature are taken by consensus through a 5 day AFD debate/vote.

Noah made the claim in the article that if no consensus is reached or no debate is had at the end of five days then the article in question is automatically deleted. This is NOT true; actually this is the exact opposite of the truth. If no consensus is reached the default is to KEEP the article, not delete it.

Given the nature of these debates as attempts to reach consensus Noah interrupted a process and pushed his own opinion over those of many Wikipedia editors; by using an alternative and far more public forum Noah made the debate on this article one-sided and ensured that a flood of individuals would come to his defense, diluting and disrupting the process used to decide issues such as these on Wikipedia.

--TheWay

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Some of the Admins on Wikipedia are flat craz-ee. I got into a spat with one over correcting some details of a bio of a controversial research scientist I know, all done according to the Wikipedia rules, naturally. I also made the horrendous mistake of revealing my true ID (I'm an MD, PhD researcher).

Next I know, the admin is wandering thru Wikipedia deleting as many of my postings as he can, under the excuse that I have cited some of my own scientific work. I point out that under the rules this is perfectly OK, as long as the citation is at arms length. So he goes over and attempts to change the rules.

Meanwhile, members of his "clique" are sending public messages to each other proposing to look very closely at my postings. Apparently, to send a message. True, there is no "wikipedia cabal". But there are groups of people who cooperate in faking a "consensus"-- against the rules, naturally. The lesson is that you post on controversial subjects at your peril.

Such behavior constitutes one of the reasons Wikipedia has such difficulty in retaining the various thankless "experts" that really make the thing work.

--sesquiculus

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The questions you bring up are actually part of an ongoing debate between [Inclusionism and Deletionism/ Exclusionism]. I myself am a firm inclusionist. But the deletionists and exclusionists are coming from a position that's understandable.

The problem is that the Wikipedia elites (those with editor and sysop powers) are not really representative of general Wikipedia users. They are generally older (late 20's - mid 30's, I'd guess) and more tech-savvy. They've dealt with millions of idiots who create vanity pages for themselves and their friends, or the thousands of local bands who create pages for themselves with no citations other than their MySpace profile, and as a result have become overzealous in their response. This doesn't apply to your case, but from what I've seen in my own forays, they are, by and large, not very knowledgeable about youth pop culture topics. The biggest problem in my opinion has been with Internet culture and viral memes. There are way too many editors who see all these things as stupid and trivial, and are completely unaware of the culture surrounding them, so they aggressively delete these articles and prevent re-creation. As a result, it takes months for something as obviously notable as [Chuck Norris Facts] to get a legitimate article.

My philosophy is fairly simple - if I go to Wikipedia expecting to find an article, it should be there.

--achilleselbow

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I'm a moderator on probably the 4th largest forum in a particular field. That's probably not a notable entry, except that an entry existed for #3. So I thought, hey, I'll create entries for #1, #2 and #4, round the whole picture out. I started with my own, since I know it well. Instantly it was targeted for deletion. Net result, Wikipedia never got my entries for #2 and #1, since I no longer gave a shit, yet #3 alone survives with an entry, arbitrarily.

More and more I just think Wikipedia is a bad, fundamentally flawed idea, a mistaken concept that works against the Web's best principles and is inevitably biased on any subject with a pulse. I try not to use it and refuse to answer posts on other sites where the content thrown at me is primarily from Wikipedia (some people, of course, argue solely by Wikuotation).

--Emsworth

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