Asymmetrical Information

Megan,

I interpret this as proof that you are not a progressive.

I've had several stub articles I've written at Wikipedia deleted for lack of notability. The number 1 manufacturer of hobbylist metalworking lathes, for example. Sure, it's not quite as important as the article on racism in gay society, or Darth so-and-so, a character (apparently) from a little known novel set in the Star Wars universe, or a closed theme park in NJ, but it's still of interest to the 50,000 people who subscribe to one of the magazines on hobbyist metalworking...

The "notability" requirement in Wikipedia is grossly abused, and - in my experience - even citing the exact text of the policy is entirely insufficient to deter the self-appointed encyclopedia cops who "enforce" it.

Have you noticed that many television series have a Wikipedia page for every single episode?

I don't comment here often, but as part of your "little gaggle" I think this deletion is a hoot. As far as I can tell, the only possible grounds a hyperlinked source with no effective constraint on the "ones" and "zeros" it contains can have for restricting the amount of information it offers is to provide the "Spikes" of this world something to judge.

My advice to Wikipedia would the to take that wasted energy being applied to restrict quantity, and redirect it toward a much-needed improvement in quality.

Damn, where at the top of your screen is your "edit this page" button? *be

Wikipedia's notability criterion has things back-a55swards. The strength of Wikipedia over dead trees is that memory is cheap; they should be welcoming stubs (short mentions) on topics of interest to small numbers of people and encouraging people to post on their areas of expertise. The long tail should be Wikipedia's strength.

The problem is not so much space, it's just that ...

When Wikipedia becomes the best source of information for a detailed polot synopsis of *every South Park episode*, you know they've kind of gone astray.

Someone at SomethingAwful came up with a great Wikipedia game: Find two articles with physically-similar titles but different lengths, such that the longer, more detailed one, is irrelelvant to the needs of the target audience of Wikipedia.

I can't access SA here (ahem) but here are some examples I remember:

"home improvement" vs. "home improvement (tv show)"

"babylon" vs. "babylon V"

You just don't want Wikipedians to be primarily focused on writing about their favorite obscure comic book ... at least , not in extreme detail.

The reason is pretty simple - they don't want every bored kid writing themselves into the encyclopedia - a huge number do it as-is, but they all get deleted. If they didn't, everyone and their dog would be in, despite the fact that they're just a useless highschool kid with ten minutes to kill, and that's just bad. They may set the bar a tad high, but it needs to be there.

Wikipedians are too busy to bother with non-important entries like yours. Think how the quality of the encyclopedia would suffer if time was diverted from important pages, like this one.

If they spent time on your entry, they might overlook vital information, like that "Lord Soth of Krynn was served by thirteen skeleton warriors, the cursed undead remnants of his loyal retainers." And how embarrassing would that be for a site that fancies itself the next Encyclopedia Britanica?

"she has a little gaggle of followers"

what's the next step up from a "gaggle"?

Maybe when you reach that point they will rewrite a wikipedia entry for you...

There are really two types of people who contribute to Wikipedia.

The first group thinks it's important to include every piece of information about everything, ever. This is how we get detailed analysis of the eight separate timelines seen in the Back to the Future movies.

The second group considers Wikipedia to be a "serious reference work" and go around deleting stuff they think is not up to the strict "Wikipedia standards". These people are, to be honest, utter dicks.

I sense a business opportunity - a wikipedia for the rest of us. Each person can have their own page and edit it as they see fit.

Oh wait, that may have already been done ;)

Damn! There go my chances of getting onto Wikipedia at all.

Ten bucks say the page is back by the end of the week, anyway. Just a minor thing this.

Just why is it bad for every high school kid to have a page in Wikipedia?

I think it may be driven in large part by the limitations of current search technology. If somebody searches Wikipedia for Chris ODonnell, I'd guess it's 99% likely that they are looking for the actor, and not me, or the 20 high school kids trhat may have the same name. So why should my page gum up the results?

Also, there is probably a nerd bias in Wikipedia. If Jane were a network security expert with a gaggle of followers, she'd probably be in Wikipedia. An economist / writer just doesn't merit the same worth there.

The much more important side to WP other than their comic book and TV obsession is that it's a) at the top of search results for most phrases, and b) it frequently contains misleading information, largely because of what hasn't been put in an entry (or has been deleted from an entry). If someone had set out to conduct a massive disinformation campaign they couldn't have done a better job.

We're not a gaggle; we're a pride!

Without any such controls, you can imagine how it might degenerate into a bunch of hey-look-at-me type of pages. It's probably for the same reason that they forbid commercialization -- to keep it pure to its original intent. Also, the storage constraints may not be severe, but if you have 16 William Clintons on the disambiguation page including William W. Clinton from Mobile, AL who won the Alabama pie eating contest 4 years in a row... well, you get the picture.

You'll always be the top Megan McArdle on MY disambiguation page!

Not enough hot, local department store, active wear, modeling pics.

We are talking nerds, right?

I had a stub article deleted from Wikipedia as well.

It was an article about the web site Silicon Investor. Which has many thousands of users and over 23 million posts.

It seems blogs and discussion sites don't seem as notable as they really are according to the standards that Wikipedia (or at least many Wikipedians) use. They don't get a lot of mention in regular news programs, and they don't get books written about them.

and here I had figured you had it deleted apurpose... it was still in the cache anyway...

I'm figuring I would only ever get in there for being something stupidly infamous like "first person to spontaneously combust on national TV. ratings tanked after he was too dead to do it again..."

http://www.partiallyclips.com/pclipslite.php?id=1483

The second group considers Wikipedia to be a "serious reference work" and go around deleting stuff they think is not up to the strict "Wikipedia standards". These people are, to be honest, utter dicks.

I've had several (admittedly not terribly important) articles deleted from Wikipedia; I suspect the Edit Police would've left them alone if I were a liberal Democrat. (They don't call it "Leftypedia" for nothing.) And then there's the people who treat the articles they write like personal fiefdoms: dare to make a change and WHAM! their "administrator" buddies come down on you like a ton of bricks.

Wikipedia, like all good ideas, has been runied by the cliques that inevitably form...

What beats the detailed episode guides are the detailed entries on fictional characters in TV, film, novels, etc.

I am considering the possibility for a new entry entitled "Megan McArdle, The Most Famous Person Deleted From Wikipedia".

Jane,

Your own article may have been deleted from Wikipedia, but you live on in Wikipedia in the List of Famous Tall Women: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famous_tall_women

They have flippin' Amanda Marcotte, they should have you. If you don't know who she is you should read Ace of Spades more often. Sigh, I guess this is more proof that the wiki leans left.

This post encouraged me to check to see if my own Wikipedia entry was still there. It was. I confess that I initiated it myself some years ago. What I have always found amusing is how often total strangers will edit it. Occasionally, I have had to fix things where people have asserted views to me that I have never expressed and do not hold. I worry about what will happen to my entry when I am no longer around to offer corrections.

The thing to do is to write an article about someone who does not exist outside your own imagination, and see how long you have to wait for someone to edit it.

Amanda Marcotte is a flavour of ice cream. I know. I read it on Wikipedia.

There are quite a few Wikipedia editors who go around and mostly mark things for deletion that they deem non notable. I never really understood it either, why not just keep it all? They do now accept blogs as sources, so maybe in time everyone with a blog will be notable then everyone.

I suspect this is down to the Economist not giving you a byline - there is a fair bit of print envy over at Wikipedia. That and your pseudonymity here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Galt

what's the next step up from a "gaggle"?

Minions.

I have no idea who you are. Thus, Wikipedia must have made the right decision. Wait, but I came here because you were deleted. Ha! now you are well enough known to be on Wikipedia. Oh! the irony....

I have no idea who you are. Thus, Wikipedia must have made the right decision. Wait, but I came here because you were deleted. Ha! now you are well enough known to be on Wikipedia. Oh! the irony....

There's currently a push on to severely restrict the number of living people who have biographical articles, to some arbitrary level which will allow Wikipedia to patrol them all to make sure nothing libellous (read: negative and not airtightly sourced) gets slipped in. As Joel Bernstein said above, this push is led by people who think Wikipedia should be a "serious reference work", but who have worse social skills than the SF geeks who write hundreds of TV episode summaries.

It's a problem, and more subtle than the mockery it gets in places like here.

There's currently a push on to severely restrict the number of living people who have biographical articles, to some arbitrary level which will allow Wikipedia to patrol them all to make sure nothing libellous (read: negative and not airtightly sourced) gets slipped in. As Joel Bernstein said above, this push is led by people who think Wikipedia should be a "serious reference work", but who have worse social skills than the SF geeks who write hundreds of TV episode summaries.

It's a problem, and more subtle than the mockery it gets in places like here.

According to Wikipedia, as of 14 June 2007, there are 200,144 notable living people. Since you are evidently on the cusp, you can take cold comfort in looking down on 6,599.8 million of us.

NPOV

Interesting explanation.

On the web 'fundamental attribution error' is rife. We assume Jane Galt/Megan is being deleted because Wikipedia is left of centre, etc.

Explanations which are based on real organisational constraints are far more likely ie there have been well publicised cases of defamation suits.

FWIW in my experience of Wikipedia (in the energy field) 'leftish' postings have been editing to defend 'libertarian' positions (that new energy technologies don't work and are counterproductive).

In one of those cases I think that it is probably a genuine case of a libertarian who hates CAFE (lots of cites of Cato Institute papers). The other I think it is a guy who has a genuine axe to grind with a new coal energy technology.

More interesting is that you're wounded by the decision.

Timothy Noah wrote about his experience of being deleted from Wikipedia on Slate. Not long afterward, Wikipedia restored Noah's entry. You know what you have to do.

Bruce -- I know of a similar situation. A friend (I would guess a mutual friend of ours, most likely) who is a national columnist had his page pretty severly vandalised by someone ascribing views to him that are almost the opposite of those he advocates.

Not being nearly narcissistic enough, I guess, he didn't realize this for several weeks until I happened upon the information. So, the concern over what happens when the subject of a post is no longer around to police the site (and thus his/her reputation) is a real one.

It has nothing to do with political leanings and everything to do with ignorant assholes on Wikipedia.

The good news is that if more people join the site and participate in these discussions, then these idiotic moves can be stopped. Wikipedia relies on consensus, or at least they claim to.