The Technium

The Wikipedia Deletion Wars

There’s a fabulous insider’s account of how topics make it or don’t make it into Wikipedia. Why does one person, company, or place get their page while another doesn’t?The process is full of flawed humanity, and not at all as objective as a newbie might think. Written by Nicholson Baker, this detailed report is tucked into a book review of “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual”.

This first-person account, disguised as a long book review in the New York Review of Books, delves deep into the core negotiations that every line in Wikipedia is subject to. But the piece really shines in describing a current fad on Wikipedia — deleting less popular subjects entirely. Here’s a bit: 

In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists—some of the most original and articulate people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the “web-comic articles purge of 2006.” A victim, Trev-Mun, author of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: “I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others’ sand castles.” Another artist, Howard Tayler, said: “‘Notability purges’ are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors.” Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organized deleters to book burners, and he said: “Your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene. Every word in every valid article you’ve destroyed should be converted to profanity and screamed in your face.” 



Image from The Great Wikipedia Webcomic Purge of 2007

Baker’s ode to the complexities of Wikipedia’s genesis is crammed with wonderful details. He describes the little-known fact that many articles about historical subjects begin from older encyclopedias in the public domain.

But [Wikipedia] also became great because it had a head start: from the beginning the project absorbed articles from the celebrated 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is in the public domain. And not only the 1911 Britannica. Also absorbed were Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Nuttall’s 1906 Encyclopedia, Chamber’s Cyclopedia, Aiken’s General Biography, Rose’s Biographical Dictionary, Easton’s Bible Dictionary, and many others. In August 2001, a group of articles from W.W. Rouse Ball’s Short Account of the History of Mathematics—posted on the Net by a professor from Trinity College, Dublin—was noticed by an early Wikipedian, who wrote to his co-volunteers: “Are they fair game to grab as source material for our wikipedia? I know we are scarfing stuff from the 1911 encyclopedia, this is from 1908, so it should be under the same lack of restrictions….” It was. Rouse Ball wrote that Pierre Varignon

    “was an intimate friend of Newton, Leibnitz and the Bernoullis, and, after l’Hospital, was the earliest and most powerful advocate in France of the use of differential calculus.”

In January 2006, Wikipedia imported this 1908 article, with an insertion and a few modernizing rewordings, and it now reads:

    “Varignon was a friend of Newton, Leibnitz, and the Bernoulli family. Varignon’s principal contributions were to graphic statics and mechanics. Except for l’Hôpital, Varignon was the earliest and strongest French advocate of differential calculus.”

But the article is now three times longer, barnacled with interesting additions, and includes a link to another article discussing Varignon’s mechanical theory of gravitation.

We have a idealized notion of how Wikipedia is created — that there is a inert Darwinian struggle between uninformed nonsense and higher quality information as they are selected in the hive mind, and the good stuff wins over time. The truth is that Wikipedia is a hive mind of human ego, hubris, obsession, and passion. Each article suffers through a human drama worthy of a soap opera. Indeed I can safely predict there will be novels and TV shows built around the maelstrom in a single Wikipedia article someday.

To the creators of Web 2.0 and beyond it is vital to remember than this power of the hive mind is intensely messy and full of the wild territory of personality and humanity. The crowd is both wiser and more irrational in aggregate. The tools to make this crowd useful are primarily the tools of dealing with people.

So who won the deletion wars? According to Wikipedia, the deletionists lost. Sure articles are deleted all the time, but there is more agreement now on the kind of articles that truly are worth keeping.

If every Wikipedian had been a staunch inclusionist, we’d have tens of thousands of articles on gay and smelly high school kids, not to mention every pet cat who ever did something adorable. On the other hand, if every Wikipedian had been a staunch deletionist, we’d be a boring clone of Encarta with no ads. Maybe each side did have something to offer after all, even if it was only keeping the other side down. But the time of the deletionists and inclusionists has, now and forever, come to an end…

  • Sarah Hulcy

    One can only wish it were over!  All it takes is one super-Editor (one of the long-time editors) and a few of his/her friends and no matter how well-known or admired the subject of the page, they will tie it up with sneak attacks clothed in deletionist-speak.  They will tag a page for “speedy deletion” and if you don’t have someone sitting on the page on a daily basis to keep watch, the super-Editor will get his editor friends to jump in and agree the article needs to be deleted for a never-ending variety of excuses.  These editors know every single minuscule WP “policy, rule, guideline” etc.  Unless you are a WP expert, by the time you learn the terminology and methods of these power-hungry egotists, your page will either have been deleted or “edited” down from something that someone put a lot of time and care in creating, to what amounts to a footnote.

    These super-Editors have amazingly long memories for imagined slights, are fond of self-aggrandizing discourses on their personal pages and know exactly which of the other super-Editors will join them in a round-robin attack on someone with whom one of these people has a dispute – no matter how imagined or idiotic the dispute may be.

    There are processes for “resolution” of the disputes that are also 100% controlled by the super-Editors.  As soon as you write a sentence challenging their beliefs, you will be attacked by other long-time editors with a plethora of unknown (to the WP newbie) acronyms, rules, and policies in the most denigrating way possible.  I.E. “You are the biggest idiot on the planet, know nothing about how WP is supposed to work, haven’t memorized the entire list of rules and policies,  and don’t have any business even commenting on this page because we, the rulers of WP, have decided you are not worthy of being accepted into the ranks of those of us who know exactly how to manipulate the rules and you should just slink quietly from the room with your tail between your legs.”  Yes, I paraphrase, but that is the essential message.

    If you continue to attempt to refute the deletionists’ verdicts, the attacks will become nastier and nastier, you will be attacked for every “non-WP” utterance, accused of “soap-boxing” if you get frustrated or upset with the process, etc.  Oh, and you should make sure you have nothing else to do (like work for a living) so you can set “watch” on the page so you are notified immediately of any change made.  That’s what the majority of these people do.  They have no life outside of WP and pride themselves on how many edits they can count up on a daily basis.  “I am one of the top Editors on WP because in 6 years I have made 87,000 edits.”  [That is NOT a paraphrase.]  The only way someone could rack up a total like that is to do nothing but delete, delete, delete – mostly without a single explanation of why, in their lofty opinion, something deserves to be deleted – after all, if you had an IQ higher than a rock, you would already know why something had been deleted.

    Well, since this is obviously drawn from personal experience, it should be obvious that I do not believe in WP’s vaunted “fairness and equality.”  A word of warning:  be VERY careful what you say in defense of a page one of these super-Editors has in their sights.  You will be attacked continually until you realize that there is nothing rational or reasonable about the process… and, eventually, will turn your attention to something more worthy than continuing a never-ending dialog in a system apparently twisted to serve the egos of some very small-minded people who have nothing better to do than think up clever ways to basically say “Because I said so!”

    • Solyndra

      basically say “Because I said so!”

      Also a perfect description of U.S. legal system