Seriously.

I'm a "deletionist".

I want to delete Wikipedia and replace it with a resource that applies professional standards. With any luck, and with the advent of Google Knol, improvements in access to Britannica or something similar, I might get my wish.

I can't help you rescue Wikipedia. Sorry.

Check your spiel-chucker —

I'm prettty sure that's spelled "delusionists".

Would you agree that the triumph of "deletionist" philosophy would at least improve Wikipedia?

Welcome, new user, Jon Awbrey. Great first post!

Greg

Like, a Virgin —

Jon

Wow, I didn't notice that. What happened? Were you being cyberstalked?

Yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wiki...s_of_Jon_Awbrey

dOOd!!! Biatchin!!!!

Awbrey, YOU ARE ANTICHRIST!!!! FIE UNTO YOU!!!

Hi Jon, I've heard so much about you- all good of course (well, on here anyway)

I'm a deletionist, though not as much as Kato. I want to delete bollox from the wiki.

This John Awbrey is clearly a sockpuppet of an established user. He knew how to edit a post within just over an hour of joining. Somey: RfCU!

Someone ought to create an ad-supported "cruftwiki.org" to transwiki articles to instead of deleting them.

So what's stopping you? This is the internet, you can have your own site whenever you want.

money, space, bandwidth, time, legal considerations (would need to get a lawyer in case of lolsuits).

A 40-year-old virgin or a slim one?

No, more like psyborg-stalked, but I knew I could throw them off the trail by adopting this clever diss-guys. Ya really gotta keep 'em guessing — it's the only thing they know how to do.

But enuff about me — we we're talking about delusionism.

Jon


Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind …

Jon

I have conducted an RfCU. John Awbrey has used the same IP as another user. However, this is clearly a statistical fluke so not related.

So apparently he's not living in England in a similar way, or else apparently located in the same state as a banned user?

Yes, but is he using the Internet in a similar way (with a similar TCP/IP protocol)?

This has been discussed.

I wonder if I could swing a deal with Sue Gardner to automatically transwiki to Wikipedia Review.com the deleted BLPs and corporate non-notables? We could slap on a specially-accounted Google AdSense ad on those articles, and I'd share revenues 50-50 back with the WMF.

Think she'd go for it?

Greg

Only if WMF retains the rights to the TV Game Show — working titles : You Bet Your Cruft! … I've Got A Cruft! … Million Dollar Pyramid Of Cruft! … Bowling For Cruft! … <Your Country>'s Next Teen Administrator! … Dancing With The BarnStars! — plus controlling interest in the Non-Action Figures and the Home Game versions.

Jon

Not to get back to the original point or anything, but what sort of deletions are you objecting to, Mr., uh, Zjtzzz?

I used to tell myself that if I ever decided to participate over there, I'd be a deletionist myself... but I've actually softened on that stance considerably, due in no small part to the often-cogent arguments of people like Everyking and Badlydrawnjeff. I mean, if the information isn't harming anybody, why not include it? And it's not like "recentism" is really all that harmful, though of course it makes WP look a little silly on occasion.

Another thing: I suspect some (if not most) people think that those of us who support a BLP opt-out policy are, almost by definition, "deletionist" - but I don't think that's true at all. If the OO/NOB proposal works as well as I expect it to work, particularly in combination with "flagged revisions" and a more liberal use of semi-protection, it should actually mean more BLP articles, since people will be far less fearful of writing them. IOW, if I want to write a BLP about someone I actually like, I'm going to think long and hard about it if I know that there are other users on WP who don't like that person - because there's a good chance I'll lose control over it and ultimately do the subject more harm than good.

If the subject can opt out, though, then that's really not a problem - it effectively forces both supporters and detractors to be fair to the subject, for fear of losing the article completely. As a result, all of the articles get improved as an almost-natural process, even if the occasional bit of nastiness - some of which, admittedly, might be sourceable - gets deleted.

Mainly my objections are to all notability guidelines, and the broad-brush way reliable source guidelines tend to be applied (quickly judging reliabilty by the type of source, rather than taking a harder look to determine if the particular source in question is reliable or not; also, the emphasis against using primary sources).

I have no objection to NPOV, V, BLP, or the general idea behind RS.

That sounds like a perfectly reasonable approach, actually.

There's a page called Notability/Arguments that spells out most of the WP-tolerated objections to the use of notability guidelines, but it should be noted that the existing guidelines are mostly for things that people want to promote (except for the one on numbers, and arguably the one on academics). According to the navigation template, the list currently contains:

• Academics
• Books
• Films
• Music
• Numbers
• Organizations & companies
• People
• Web content

And there are ones in the works for Fiction, Places and transportation, Schools, and "Serial works." If you do a search, you'll find additional ones that have been deprecated and merged into the aforementioned ones - these were separate guidelines for software, breweries, royalty, science, sports, TV and radio stations, porn actors, comedy, highways, athletes, doctors, journalists, albums, and so on.

In sum, all of this is a classic example of what WP'ers call "instruction creep." The near-impossibility of getting intellectual control over all of these disparate guidelines makes it very difficult for WP as a website to apply them fairly and evenly across the board. They don't even know where the board begins and ends, really.

It's probably good that they make the attempt though, if only to avoid obvious privacy violations against people. And to the extent that this will eventually lead to the breakup of WP into smaller websites, obviously anything that helps to Hasten The Day™ is good, as long as they're going to run the show the way they're running it now... As for the rest, this whole issue of what's "encyclopedic" and what isn't is mostly bogus. The real issue is that they can't decide what's "spam" and what isn't, and in their efforts to keep the spammers out, they're probably deleting a ton of perfectly good content.

In other words, there's a lot of bathwater, but it's a really big baby, too.

Baby Huey?

I think that Jon is spot-on when he says that those described as "deletionists" in wiki-speak are more properly referred to as "delusionists". As a "deletionist" on WP, I suffered from two significant delusions I believe to be common among deletionists:

1) That "deletionism" serves to improve, and to increase the credibility of, "the project". While this might appear to be the case in certain instances in the short term, in the longer term it merely assures ongoing drama with the "inclusionists". Despite their constant hand-wringing and whining about "the triumph of deletionism", the inclusionists do not seem to be going away at a significantly greater rate than the deletionists, nor do they seem to be ready to surrender.

2) That Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It is a great many things (many of which it hypocritically claims not to be), but an encyclopedia is not one of them. This is a delusion they share in common with the "inclusionists". Ironically, it is also the central delusion that spurs the deletionists into constant battle with the inclusionists, due to their conviction that the efforts of the inclusionists render "the project" less "encyclopedic".

Come to think of it, I suppose inclusionists are "delusionists", too. They are just delusional in a different way.

Okay, define "encyclopedia." And, what's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet. No? What am I missing? Wikipedia's a compendium of miscellaneous information, of uneven quality and uneven editing, all dumped on one server and accessed by one crappy search engine, and a second better one (called GOOGLE). You come up with another name if you don't like "encyclopedia." How about "Wikipedia"? There, look how much time we saved, as it's in use already. A name is an implied set of essences. All we have to do is convince every user of the language that one implied set of essenses ("Wikipedia") is NOT actually a subset of the OTHER implied set of previously defined essences ("encyclopedia"). But how much fun is THAT? Man, I'd rather see a periodontist.

By and large, deletionists want to make Wikipedia more like a conventional, reliable and respectable encyclopedia. It is an encylopedia now, just not a reliable or respectable one.

I tend to agree, but this to me only means that the political structure - a consensus of 15-25 year old web-dwelling pseudonyms and their sockpuppets - is unsuited to the task at hand, which should be obvious anyhow.

Im not usually one to quibble over semantics... well, okay, maybe I am, but regardless, I used to think the same thing - namely that it didn't really matter if people called it an "encyclopedia" or not. I'm not sure when I changed my mind, but the whole "deletionists vs. inclusionists" thing was a big part of that. If they called themselves a "compendium" or a "gazeteer" or "Jimbo's Big Bag o' Trivia," then a major source of justification for much of the pseudo-philosophical bickering that goes on over there would probably disappear.

That's not to say they would stop, though, and to some extent it doesn't matter, because the real issues from their perspective are intellectual control, legal exposure, and spam. (Presumably very few of them think about privacy or the potential for psychological/emotional damage done to their own contributors.) Those issues would exist whether or not they called themselves an "encyclopedia," but by calling themselves that, they also produce what really amounts to a set of unnecessary conflict layers, pitting deletionists vs. inclusionists, experts vs. non-experts, purists vs. innovators... all of which are distractions to try and keep people interested after they've written whatever it is they showed up to write - people who would otherwise only stick around to protect their own stuff.

Yes, indeedy. An encylopedia that anybody can edit is a TREMENDOUSLY innovative and brilliant idea!! A piece of crap that anybody can edit, OTOH, is sort of expected, and not worth the time it takes to remark on it. So I suppose it's all in the claims, and the claims are in the labels. Your mileage may vary.

The reality is somewhere between "encyclopedia" and "piece of crap". As usual with the internet and new technology, we need a new word. It's not an encyclopedia, nor entirely a peice of crap. It's, it's.... a wikipedia. What you get when you AIM to make an encyclopedia, but let anybody edit. Duh.

Yes, that's the great tragedy. There are many excellent articles on Wikipedia (I started or contributed to some of them myself ) that would credit any encyclopaedia. Unfortunately, they are only a small proportion of the total.

Milton,

Have you
ever read …
Wikipedia?

Jon

Scholium. In the non-pirated text, it's "word", not "name".

Among the WP:NOT disclaimers, there is one to the effect that Wikipedia Is Not a Battleground.

Well, mebbe WP would prefer not to be a battleground (e.g. for Inclusionists vs. Deletionists, or BLP Notability vs. Obscurity), but it's hard to deny that the site is very much a battleground in many ways.

Eh. Fuck deletionists; they're ruining what little value the wiki ever had by deleting articles on fiction and so forth; what they're going to have left is articles on widely-covered subjects that are better and more accurately covered elsewhere. Let them dig their own graves for all I care.

I hate to see bollox on the wiki. When I see it, it has to go vanity articles, articles about a little known creature or weapon in an unknown roleplaying game etc. Unfortunately there are a lot of fanboys on wiki, so it's hard to delete some of this stuff.

Jonny, I was getting reverted at WP long after you'd been escorted to the door. I could tell a tale whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul. And yes, I can use the internet to look up quotes as well as anybody else, just so I get the commas in the right places and so on. But I happen to think that's cheating. It's the difference between playing a song on an instrument (however badly) and pulling the earpiece of your iPOD out, and pointing it at somebody.


Well, you should. Do some more thinking and get back to us. Yes, and I know that's uncivil. And you know what?

When all you know about someone is the name of their avatar, a Google search is about the best one can do.


It looks like Eric Oestrich (User:Erichapkido) is a budding young prize-winning author of fantasy fiction novels, artist, and designer of PHP-based role-playing games on Linux.

All worthy endeavors, and (I daresay) more creative and emotionally satisfying than battling cranky editors on Wikipedia.

For the inclusionists (who I take to be those people who think bandwidth and server space are infinite, especially if they're not paying for it), I would say this:

Fine wine is a distillation of grape minus the crap. If you dilute it, there comes a point where it is no longer classified as wine. Take it further still, and it is not classified as anything but water.

Encyclopedias are not and never have been about "the sum of all knowledge". They are a distillation of knowledge. Knowledge where more and more trivia is added to, stops being an encycopedia. Take it further still, and it no longer qualifies as knowledge.

I read Britannica as a child, and I can certainly testify that the point of Britannica was to get me to check facts and read books that underpin Britannica.

I have read a large number of articles on Wikipedia (probably 40-50,000 articles) on a wide range of subjects. Most of the time Wikipedia forces me to question Wikipedia's presentation of facts and how much a subject has been screwed with by ignoramuses. Occasionally there are great articles, but I feel sorry for the poor bastards who created such great articles whose work can be shat upon literally by anyone with an Internet connection at any time day or night. You know what? After reading Wikipedia, I don't feel like checking sources, because if they're as badly written as the text, I don't want to waste my precious lifespan on it.

Most Wikipedian articles are badly written, syntactic minefields of poor reasoning which can only derive from the multitudes of people for whom English may be their only language but its not the one they're comfortable expressing themselves in.

Tenses are usually the first sign that articles have been written by two or more people. Subjects having no object and objects without subjects are usually the second sign. A taste for sensationalism over comprehensiveness pervades Wikipedia.

So in conclusion, and to shorten the post to a nice point: Fuck inclusionism. Inclusionism to Wikipedia is what causes most of the problems.

Just imagine if people didn't have the right to create new articles unless the article subject was first passed by a responsible editorial board - Wikipedia would be a lot smaller and the articles would be a whole lot better because with a limited supply of articles, the premium would be on quality and completeness. Imagine if the Wikimedia Foundation stopped all creates unless 95% of current articles passed stringent quality checks - so its either get the article right or if that can't be done, AFD the crap with gusto. The same with BLPs - can't write a biography? Then don't write one at all.

Have I said lately that I favor the construction of responsible encyclopedias that rise to a normative level of accuracy, excellence, and ethics in media?

Not for a few minutes, no.

So, out of interest, what is your opinion of, for instance, the "Followers of Set" from "Vampire: the Masquerade"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Followers_of_Set

Or need I ask?

I have no objection to Jimbo Wales inviting his minions to engage in a fancruft project to craft the Internet's biggest compendium of articles on obscure items of popular culture.

Just don't call it an encyclopedia.