First off,** Steve MB**, I was joking with the gang rape comment. You know, like you are distorting the concept of “vandalism”, I distorted the concept of gang rape. Ha ha? 3 roll-eyes? Sheesh.
Secondly, your Timothy Noah quote is sort of at odds with your points - not bolstering them. Enforcing some antiquated social code isn’t quite the same as vandalism. Especially, when most people seem to prefer it.
You are being as ridiculous as the record companies that call copyright infringement “theft”. At least they have the excuse that they are losing money. Your only excuse is that you think it’s a God-given right to add and/or find every single piece of trivia on Wikipedia.
Admins are few and far between and a single person can make a hundred speedy deletions a day. And how often do you see something that’s been deleted get restored? It happens but it’s rare. Hardcore deleters know that if they delete a hundred items they’ll get away with ninety of them - and they can always come back next week and try again on the other ten.
My point is that there should be some attempt made so that the effort of deletion is approximately balanced with the effort of creation. Because right now it’s off-balance by a factor of around a thousand to one. And that’s what makes it possible for a small number of irresponsible deleters to have an effect far out of proportion to their actual numbers.
I just wanted to say that I agree with Bryan’s criticism.
And, I wanted to post a link to this clever jab at the online encyclopedia; When wikipedia rules the world. Be sure to hover your pointer over the comic a second to get the tool-tip (it’s an added punchline for after you’ve read the strip). Wondermark, by David Malki is the web-comic the strips from, and I highly recommend it.
And if someone who actually watches whichever show she’s on decides to write another dozen pages worth of about her (assuming there is enough material for it)… so what?
Are you or I ever going to look at the article? Even if we were, we could skim the overview and link directly to whichever subsection related to what we wanted to know. Why does it bother you how much content people write about something they like, but you don’t? That’s my essential barrier to understanding many of the content-deletion suggestions. So much of it seems to be based on one group of people feeling a particular thing isn’t relevant, because they aren’t interested.
For an example, GUComics is a very influential web-comic in the hard-core dedicated MMO-playing community, and it’s writer was personally invited to a number of community events held by SOE during the heyday of Everquest (the first). Their wikipedia article was deleted along with a large number of other webcomic’s articles by someone based on not being in print, nor being referenced by a printed material, and therefore being irrelevant. Just because some fucker hasn’t heard of it (and certainly, it’s a small base of people who read it), doesn’t make it irrelevant when some of the leading companies in the business invite the author to events, their community managers are on a first name basis with the guy, etc.
As has been stated before, there’s no effective space limit to wikipedia. This stuff isn’t being hosted at the expense of other, more significant content. Wikipedia isn’t begging it’s readers to cut down their bandwidth or data storage because of financial woes, are they?
PS. I think trivia sections should remain, on the basis that often the information is of interest, but doesn’t really fit into the main body of an article. Providing a sepparate subsection for things like that is a good idea IMHO. Now, if editors want to contend whether specific items are relevant to a trivia section, whether they could fit into another part of the article or are simply too mundane and pointless, is another thing entirely. The trivia section’s wordcount should not have a significant size relative to the main body of an article, I agree. But the section in-and-of-itself seems like a smart way to organize extraneous tidbits that may be usefull or at least interesting to a portion of the readership.
Oh good lord! You two are fighting about different things!
Otto, you’re saying that many of the people pushing for select irrelevant content are justified, because they are operating under the aegis of Wikipedia’s owners own guidelines.
Steve is argueing that many people are going about deleting stuff because they don’t like it, or because they enjoy being pricks (come on, you know as well as the rest of us that such people are out there, especially where the 'net is concerned), or because they have some high-minded conceit about what’s relevant, and to hell with what wikipedia’s standard is.
Maybe it’s my outside viewpoint, but it seems pretty clear to me that Steve’s whole point in labelling many of the more ardent pursuers of content deletion as vandals is to emphasize that he isn’t talking about the ones who are enforcing the official wikipedia community rules.
Trivia’s a bit of a pain in Wikipedia now, especially in TV articles where anonymous posters just have to say “object A in series X looks like object B in series Y” :smack:
[Insert here several megabytes of pictures of angry, back-arched hissing cats.]
I used to participate in a highly interesting and valuable ongoing thread on IIDB. It was effecftively destroyed when several people with high-speed connections decided they could not possibly make a comment without attaching it to a picture of Serious Cat (most commonly) or some other feline.
If you want to play that stupid game, go somewhere else to do it. The Dope is about content, not bandwidth-eating stupidity.
You wanna know what’s really not fun? I just went back to the page on The Usual Suspects for the first time in a while and realized some idiot had totally fucked up the plot summary. Poor writing, inaccurate detail, cheap slang - the whole deal, and after I’d written a damn good summary a few months back.
And when I’d finished rewriting the whole thing properly, I realized I’d misspelled one character’s name, writing “Cujon” instead of “Kujon”. No big deal, right? A simple search-and-replace, right? So I hit Control-R and it’s… REFRESH?!?! AAAAUUGH! I’ll have to edit my own page now to append “idiot” but that and the plot summary will have to wait until later.
…grumble… I feel like killing somebody who owes money to some Turks…
Posting a link is surely not eating up Dope bandwidth to any great extent, and in any case, given the thread title, a selected link to Wiki is not out of order.
It may not appeal to your sense of humour, and to others this have worn it out, but in any case, what the dope is about is definately not conforming to what your ideas about content should be unless it specifically violates board policy.
In other words, as long as I stay within the rules, I’ll post whatever I damn well please.
As for the nebulous ‘don’t be a jerk’ I hardly think this would qualify, your personal experiences on other message boards are not exactly a useful measuring criteria.
Much of the Dope’s content is bandwidth-eating stupidity. You must have noticed.
Even ignoring that, your argument would have more of a point if the SDMB allowed for inline images. Then posting pictures of serious cat would impact one’s experience of the board - mainly because the server would blow up from the strain within a few minutes.
Casdave posting a clearly identified link to a .jpg? Not really much of an impact and very easy to ignore.
Just be thankful that I ain’t allowed to post pictures of pissing elephants.
When I saw casdave’s “Seriouscat.jpg” link I was positive it would take me to a thoughtful, content-filled article on Batman, Andrew Jackson, and cheeseburgers that would have neatly tied up all the loose end in this thread. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be a picture of a cat. Thanks a lot, dave.
In most respects, Wikipedia’s no less accurate than a lot of encyclopedias. The early Britannicas had a lot of articles written by famous people in the field with little or no fact checking.
Give me a break. H3Knuckles explanation is exactly what everyone fucking thought you meant - except his excuse for you calling it vandalism. Wikipedia has specific writing guidelines pooh-poohing trivia sections and “irrelevant” info. So this bit
is bullshit. You clearly don’t like people vigorously enforcing those rules.
Anyway, I personally don’t have much opinion on whether it should be run the way it is, I’m not that big a fan. I do think though that despite the cheapness of computer memory there is something to be said for keeping most articles to a reasonable length - just from a human reading it perspective.
Unless you’re talking about a completely different process that is also called “speedy deletion,” non-admins can’t speedy delete articles. Speedy deletion means that an editor puts a tag on it and admins review it to see if it meets one of several speedy deletion criteria. If it doesn’t (or if another non-admin editor reviews the speedy deletion category and thinks it doesn’t) the tag comes off and the article remains.
When he blanket-labels people as vandals and then, when examples of non-vandalistic behaviour he’s labeled as vandalism are pointed out, persists in using the label, it’s hard to tell exactly what he means. Perhaps I need a Rosetta Stone of some sort. Or perhaps I just need to stop paying his rantings any attention and get back to my nefarious work.
Apparently the process has changed. It used to be that the policy was under normal circumstances a person who wanted to suggest something be deleted was supposed to post the suggestion, give people a few days to consider the idea, take a vote, and then act on the consensus. However, Wikipedia created a seperate policy that some things could skip the long procedure and be speedy deleted. They specifically outlined the items that were covered - things like obvious vandalism such as somebody writing “fuck” in the middle of an article. But some people decided they needed the instant gratification of speedy deletions and used them for everything. Apparently as far as they were concerned anything they wanted deleted must be obviously and overwhelmingly wrong. And quick and quiet deletions eliminated the possibility that the consensus might get it “wrong” and let them move on to the next offense against their sensibilities.
There were a lot of complaints about people misusing the speedy deletions and, judging from your post, the procedure was changed.