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Jessamyn's avatar

I am a non-admin who does a lot of work on Wikipedia primarily trying to add articles about notable women who somehow do not have pages about them. The tiny fiefdom thing is, to my mind, entirely correct. People who have specific perspectives or grudges, and a posse, and a lot of time, can often just outlast other people in Wikipedia arguments. There is so much reading and so many arcane fiddly aspects of knowing how to do Wikipedia "right" that it can be hard to get any traction in issues like this where someone (or some people) with an agenda decide they're going to go after someone, or an article about them. The good news is that since this article is a redirect (i.e. it points to Dragonball Z) it could, at some future point, be reinstated without the entire thing needing to be rewritten. Cold comfort but good to know, perhaps.

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Austin Ruse's avatar

My Wikipedia page is full of lies, things that I have never said, positions that I have never taken. At one point someone tried to actually quote some of the columns that I have written on controversial subjects and these were rejected because the place the columns ran is not viewed as “reliable“ even though they were my own words that other Wikipedia editors twisted“ in from various blogs.

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NotAWikipediaFan's avatar

While it's not allowed to edit your own page, you can use the discussion of your page to help others correct wrong and unsourced information on your page (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_Your_Own_Page). In general all information needs to have a reliable source(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources) which explicitly excludes blogs.

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Austin Ruse's avatar

The problem, of many, on wiki is what the left defines as a “reliable source”. On my page, they prefer characterizations by my political opponents about what I’ve written rather than what I’ve actually written. I’m happy to have them quite directly from any of the 1,000 columns/essays I’ve written but they won’t allow it.

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Gladys H. Pitt's avatar

says the guy who thinks being gay should be illegal ¯\_(シ)_/¯

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NotAWikipediaFan's avatar

I think one of the best things about Wikipedia is that even a detestable person of notability can have a Wikipedia page. At the very least for reasons of accountability.

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Austin Ruse's avatar

I’ve never said such a thing. Ever.

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Austin Ruse's avatar

Hah! That’s one of the lies!

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Mark Rushton's avatar

Meanwhile, Wikipedia is filled with entries for baseball players from over 100 years ago who did little more than get a single at-bat, struck out, went back to the minors, and did nothing else notable.

Or some politician in Turkey or Brazil who held a very minor elected office for a year or two in the 1950s and did nothing else notable.

Or some horse who placed 12th in a minor race decades ago and spent the rest of his life as a stud of similar caliber race horses.

Jimmy Wales has a lot to answer for.

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Space Egg's avatar

Indeed he does. Have a google of (Jimmy Wales and) Philip Cross, for more conspicuous Wikipedia shenanigans.

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loltest123's avatar

You are being trolled by logic because your logic is invalid.

Being good at things does not make you noteable. Doing lots of work does not make you noteable. Being a good person doesn't make you noteable

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Mark Rushton's avatar

I could care less.

The only thing I use Wikipedia for is checking on who died.

It's funny to see who or what they think is notable.

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NotAWikipediaFan's avatar

Why are you interested in the deaths of "baseball players from over 100 years ago" and "[insignificant politician[s] in Turkey or Brazil"?

On a more serious note: Jimmy Wales has no direct control over the contents of Wikipedia. Sure the system has it's flaws, but all in all it solves a very difficult problem in a kinda-democratic way which works out most of the time. IMHO the usability mentioned in the post is one of the smallest flaws of the system as it is consistent with the way editors use Wikipedia normally and the quoted page simply guides an unfamiliar user through the steps necessary to discuss a deletion. They could implement a form to that but what about the dozens of other actions a user might want to do (e.g. contest the validity of a source/a statement with contradicting sources/a biased formulation etc.).

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Mark Rushton's avatar

Yawn

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Alex Power's avatar

"There’s no fair and transparent appeal process at Wikipedia." - actually there is, it's just complicated.

Wikipedia's BLP (biographies of living persons) policy has teeth, for quite a lot of good reasons. There is a 15+ year history (dating back to the Seigenthaler affair) backing this up, as well as the advice of WMF legal.

Claims about living people need to have references, they can't just be added unsourced. According to the edit history < https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bruce_Faulconer&action=history >, some of them were added by a person claiming to be Bruce Faulconer; that still isn't good enough. (also, editing an article about yourself violates a different policy).

And "Bruce Faulconer is an American composer whose music was featured on Dragonball Z" on its own is not an article. Have any newspapers or magazines written about him? As far as I can tell, the answer is "no". You don't give any links or citations here, Google doesn't have any, the article didn't have any, the deletion discussion < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bruce_Faulconer > doesn't have any.

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NotAWikipediaFan's avatar

Thank you. Finally someone that gets the reasoning behind the deletion (not that I necessarily agree with it). The policy is public and while complicated also understandable and IMHO works quite well all things considered.

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Kanzeon's avatar

I guess your post wins the argument for me because I'm a lawyer and I understand how the law works. You're absolutely right that articles about living people need careful curating to avoid libel claims. And as another post points out, trying to edit your own Wikipedia page is clearly a no-no, for good reason.

An editor following rules that the editor understands, but that you do not, is not a "troll". The editor is also not necessarily a control freak running their own fiefdom. But this is how people who do not understand the rules experience life, it's why they hate lawyers and bureaucracies. When other people follow rules you do not personally understand, it feels like a "tyranny" or even the "deep state" LOL. But in reality it is just people doing their job instead of doing what you want them to do.

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Jim Trageser's avatar

lol - it can either be transparent, or complicated. Ted has very clearly delineated which it is.

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Scott W. Hallgren's avatar

And yet, Wikipedia is constantly asking for money...

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Wayne Robins's avatar

This is especially odd, because Wikipedia pages exist for probably tens of thousands of people who have accomplished nothing in particular. (I don't have one; don't want one.) The irregularities are so commonplace that in my second life as a college teacher, students are told never to use Wikipedia as a source; those that do are not only caught cheating, but cheating inaccurate information most of the time. Years of birth and death, if relevant, are mostly reliable, but not always.

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Avruch's avatar

Students are told not to use Wikipedia as a source (including by Wikipedia itself!) because it is an encyclopedia, not a primary or secondary reference work. As a general interest tertiary reference, it's accuracy is unmatched by anything else.

Probably as a college teacher you ought to have a better understanding here.

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Wayne Robins's avatar

I don't like tertiary references. I expect more of my students. They are permitted to use the references on which the encyclopedia is based if they read the original. Most don't, because of the addictive nature of "information" as opposed to "knowledge." And your final sentence seems a needlessly provocative. Wonder why you found that insult necessary.

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Jim Trageser's avatar

And an nom de plume at that ...

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Jim Trageser's avatar

I had the same rule when I taught, and when I was an editor my reporters knew better than to cite Wikipedia as a source.

You are right about Wikipedia's accuracy being unmatched - just not in the way you think.

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Martin Hackworth's avatar

Don't get me going. I agree with not only Ted's take, but Jessamyn below. Wikipedia, while not completely dominated by trolls, has a large troll problem - and it's most acute in places that you'd never suspect. I'm a physicist, and I used to spend a lot of time trying to correct obvious mistakes in a few technical topics (sometimes related to acoustics and the physics of music) only to have my correct work undone by trolls who sit on those pages. It's impossible for anyone with an actual life to do anything about it either. Right and wrong has got nothing to do with it. It's about the egos of a few people who have nothing better to do. If they actually had the qualifications to be editing the topics they sit on all day, they'd very likely have better things to do. It's just nuts. And it's the reason why I laugh every time they sent me a fundraiser. But it's not all gloom and doom. I once looked up Sigmund Freud to help a student who was in my office looking for some light biographical data and we discovered that some one had changed "Sigmund" to "Poopie" and "Freud" to "Head" throughout 8 pages of Freud's entry. Now that was good stuff!

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Jim Trageser's avatar

I had the same experience when I tried to gently correct gross factual errors on pages devoted to computer history, jazz or blues. Those in charge were more interested in being "right" than in being accurate.

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Dan York's avatar

Before condemning Wikipedia based on this article, I would encourage people to read the discussion about deleting the page in question - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bruce_Faulconer

The fundamental issue is that *there are almost no mentions of this composer in any media articles*, outside of a couple mentions about Dragon Ball Z. I tried searching myself, and also came up empty.

Wikipedia has a very clear policy about the biographies of living persons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons - and that includes that there must be references from reliable sources - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

Wikipedia also has a very clear policy about what makes a person "notable" enough to warrant a Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people). The key part is this:

> People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject.

By these policies, there is not sufficient references to justify a separate article about this composer. As a Wikipedia editor (but not an admin), I would have agreed with the request for deletion.

Note that as a result of this article, *the Wikipedia page has been restored* by an admin with the notice that it needs more reliable sources. It's now up to the author of this Substack newsletter and any other Wikipedia editors who want to get involved to find and add more appropriate references. If those references cannot be found, the article will most likely be deleted again in the future.

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Jim Trageser's avatar

What a bunch of anti-intellectual drivel. This is the reason Wikipedia was prohibited as a citation source in the upper-division English course I taught. If you want to use Wikipedia to find legitimate sources, fine - but don't even mention Wikipedia to me.

That someone has composed music that millions of people are familiar with makes them notable - whether anyone in the media noticed or not. Bryan Adams was virtually ignored by the media - yet filled arenas with fans for more than a decade. Notable or not?

I was a contributor to the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Blues - we didn't base "notability" on media coverage, but on recordings and reputation.

This has been ridiculous, reading all the Wikifans trying to defend the indefensible. I have submitted fully cited factual corrections to various Wikipedia pages back in the day, only to have them rejected by senior editors who had no clue what they were writing about. So, like most people who are actually informed and tired of dealing with ignorant trolls, I simply gave up.

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croissants's avatar

Your point about notability is what the Wikipedia system is designed to address. Without blanket rules like "significant coverage in reliable media", people end up having subjective discussions like "millions of people have interacted with their work, of course that's notable!". See, for example another comment here expressing disbelief that a prolific audiobook narrator should be notable too. Or a hypothetical opinion that whoever designed a popular Squarespace template, or the Starbucks logo, or an influencer with millions of bot followers, should all be notable. The point is to outsource that distinction to "reliable media" so it doesn't have to get religitated every single time.

So, for example, I expect that Wikipedia would take the Routledge encyclopedia you contributed to as one such source (as they do with the Grove Dictionary of Music -- though specific encyclopedia reliability varies), because it's trying to delegate the notability decision in a way that balances reliability and scalability.

Wikipedia is far from perfect, and I'm sorry you had a bad time getting corrections up. Fiefdoms do exist. But I think the compromise that's been struck works well overall.

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Jim Trageser's avatar

"Notability" is a poor substitute for expertise, particularly in a purported reference site.

It is also a racially and culturally biased criteria, because the media gives quantitatively less coverage to black, Hispanic and Asian people than it does whites. (But given the preponderance of tech nerds populating Wikipedia forums and hierarchy, the racial disparity should surprise no one.)

I'm researching the history of jazz in San Diego, and my co-author and I have been able to get a pretty good picture going back to the '50s by interviewing folks who are now in their 80s and 90s. To go back further, we'll need to find other primary sources.

The problem?

The jazz clubs in the '20s, '30s, '40s and '50s did not advertise in, and were not covered by, the daily papers in San Diego - the Sun, the Union, the Evening Tribune.

When artists like Duke Ellington, Lucky Millinder, Count Basie came to town - and hired a local band like Fro Brigham to open for them - they advertised in the local black newspapers.

Yet the local library does not have back issues of the black newspapers - not in microfiche, not on microfilm, not in bound editions. And San Diego lacks a black history center.

Maybe someone has those papers in a private collection. We're still networking through various channels hoping to find gold.

What we do have are records and tapes that show up now and then on Discogs or eBay, and memories.

So by your logic, those folks who were civic leaders in the black part of town are less deserving of being written about or remembered than their white counterparts, because the media didn't cover them.

That logic is a failure of intellectual discourse, of historical perspective, and of any kind of sense of decency.

Brittanica is accepted as a reference because they vet their editors, who are almost all subject matter experts in the fields they edit. And while Brittanica, World Book, and other encyclopedias of old were deeply notated with numerous citations for each entry, their editors and writers were also capable of doing original research.

Wikipedia? lol ... their editors are too busy writing snide putdowns of those who try to share any actual knowledge.

I've been writing about jazz and blues, as well as the computer revolution, for 40 years. I've contributed to reference books, curated exhibits at the old Computer Museum of America in San Diego. I've being doing primary research in these fields for four decades, interviewing thousands of musicians and programmers over the years, publishing them in a variety of media - but rarely in your largest dailies or magazines.

And when I pointed out basic errors of fact in jazz and blues artist entries on Wikipedia, my suggested corrections were rejected because I linked to interviews I had done with the artists that illustrated the error! I was told this was "self-promotion!" Okay, don't include the link to my article in the entry - I don't care - but fix the damn error.

Nope.

It's amateur hour over there, with too many people in positions of power who have no background nor training in either academia nor journalism, nor the subjects they oversee.

It's nothing but a collection of cosplay fan clubs feeding their needy little egos, Comic-Con rejects posing as figures of authority.

And that's all it ever can be.

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croissants's avatar

Yup. There are reasonably clear notability guidelines for most fields, and you can quibble about them, but the point is that the guidelines are concretely and publicly stated. Ted's post is largely a complaint that Wikipedia uses different notability standards than his own, which is reasonable enough on its own -- notability isn't easy to define -- but if you're making the case that something as big as Wikipedia should change its rules, something stronger than this post seems necessary.

(Ironically, I think Wikipedia's notability policy tends to be biased *toward* musicians. There are a lot of people willing to write about music for almost no money, so even a crappy band that released one unsuccessful album can have a Wikipedia page.)

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Wikipedian_of_15_Years's avatar

The process is misunderstood here. If Wikipedia were to keep all of the articles added every minute of every day, there'd be a never-ending backlog of crap to clean out. Few people are able to grasp the very easy-to-understand notability requirements these days (just have secondary sources from reputable publishers, easy enough) and just want to write about themselves or their dog.

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Anonymous's avatar

Yes, a non-discriminatory Wikipedia would be impossible to maintain. It would be an astroturfing nightmare.

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Jay L Gischer's avatar

I am a programmer, and have been one all my life. I think nobody had any business deleting any Wikipedia page, much less Faulconer's. I am going to quibble over a description you made, though.

The page recovery process is not "designed" to intimidate. It is done in a way that requires the least amount of work for Wikipedia programmers - who are not at all the same as Wikipedia editors. It is quite normal for these things, as page deletion is a very unusual think among wikis, and recovery of a deleted page is even more unusual.

So what you are seeing is more of a "nobody did the work needed to make this easier", rather than "some programmer is trying to scare you off". So, I can see that it very much has an intimidating effect, but I push back on whether that was its intention.

Nevertheless, the editors who do this - who are not at all the same as the programmers, or the Wikipedia foundation - use this to enhance their position. They enjoy the ability to separate "sheep" from "goats".

I would make the rule that no wikipedia page should ever be deleted, but that too, can be abused. This shows to me in yet another place, that human discourse must be moderated and moderated by someone with some point of view. There is no "objective" (though there is data!).

These category issues show up all over the place on the internet, just as they do in real life - American literature establishment types often turn up their noses at "genre" fiction, but the categories don't really show up in European bookstores, where, as I am told, fiction is just fiction.

They show up in music, too, as we've discussed before.

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james's avatar

Yeah seen talks by the infrastructure engineers at Wikipedia seem like good guys. Does sound like editors who not actually ones keeping the site have made a horrid mess.

I 100% agree no page should ever deleted. Maybe sent to cold storage. But deletion of information is bad for someone's opinion.

As a European don't even know what you mean by genre fiction. It's all fiction or non fiction.

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George Neidorf's avatar

Why is Wikipedia important? What difference does it make if you are in or out? I've never used it so I don't know what the fuss is about. If I want to find someone, I google their name , whether well known or not, and that name usually shows up.

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Andrea's avatar

Wikipedia makes you appear in the first positions of Google, that is the reason

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George Neidorf's avatar

Thank you.

Sounds like a horse race.

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CJK's avatar

Twelve years ago I was an RA for an eminent scholar of Islamic art and architecture. A Wikipedia editor posted a flagrantly false mischaracterization of an argument he had made in a paper some years before, and he was profoundly upset by it. When my professor attempted to edit the posts so that they aligned to the truth his edits were struck down for insufficient justification. When he attempted again, and justified them with the fact that he was in fact the author of the paper under discussion, his edit was struck down again for being based on an appeal to authority. Kafkaesque indeed.

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Avruch's avatar

Would your professor write to Britannica and demand an edit or a retraction with no more support than "because I say its so" or would he seek to point to something that supports his position? Encyclopedia's don't publish letters to the editor. Maybe your vaunted scholar, in his eminence, ought to have written to a journal, had his letter published, and then noted that for the Wikipedians editing the article about him.

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CJK's avatar

The Britannica wouldn't have printed a mischaracterization as extreme as the one I referenced because their Editors aren't trolls.

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Jim Trageser's avatar

And they double-check each other's work. Getting published in the real world generally involves several levels of editing.

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Jim Trageser's avatar

lol - THAT's your answer? He has to write an article and have it published so some 33-year-old still living in his mother's basement will correct an obvious error? Good grief ...

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Clay Wisner's avatar

Wikipedia has received their last donation from me. With the seemingly endless pages on random citizens who’ve done nothing “notable” - the audacity to spike a page that’s been around for so long (and aren’t the people at Wikipedia anime fans? Sure seems like it) when the person CLEARLY is notable in the field is just insane.

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Madjack's avatar

This is a microcosm of what the computer age and the internet have become. Corrupt, malicious, and befuddling. Sad what it has become, makes me long for the days of paper, pen, and the human touch

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Mark Entingh's avatar

I will never donate to Wikipedia. At best, they are the cliff-notes version of a true encyclopedia, at worst, a troll-owned pile of shit.

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james's avatar

It's a real shame because people working to actually keep the site up. Do an amazing job. Just case of toxic mods.

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Avruch's avatar

The standard for notability is in part meant to be protective, particularly of living people. If there's minimal independent and reliable coverage of a person, it makes it difficult-to-impossible to ensure and maintain the accuracy and integrity of the content over time. That results in hoaxes, defamation complaints, and all kinds of other bad things.

And incidentally, the author went on a bit of a rampage - creating multiple fake accounts to gild the article, ignoring policies and advice about editing with a conflict of interest and circumventing technical barriers to continually and knowingly violate Wikipedia policies. That, as much as anything else, is a big part of why the article was ultimately deleted.

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