Rhadow

What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia: (1) a storehouse of all human knowledge that we hope is (2) in a form understandable by those who want extend their understanding. To do that requires a certain amount of curation, ensuring quality of entries, without duplication, and with proper cross reference. Inevitably comes value judgement about particular articles. An essay about "My favorite cat" backed up by a single web citation from the local shopping newspaper doesn't not qualify. Efforts and significant accomplishments by an individual are. Successful sportsmen, elected officials, artists, and business people frequently qualify. Even failed attempts by groups are notable. There was either enough will or enough money to motivate them. These are stories to capture and remember. One may not agree with the motivation. One may discount the achievement or ridicule the failure, but there is a lesson to be learned. Thomas Edison should not be remembered only for his choice of tungsten to make light bulbs, but for the thousands of filaments he tried that failed.

I have had two articles dinged, one for common deletion and one for speedy deletion. Both were about companies competing in a new industry Hyperloop. Articles on Hyper Chariot and Arrivo (since deleted) both met the WP standards for style and notability. The discussions were instead about company staying power and their interest in self promotion. I deny neither. We would be well served not to make our decisions based on the merits of the subject companies. That’s a value judgement. It seems though, that it's easier to be critical than creative.

Hyper Chariot may well be a flash in the pan exercise in self-promotion. The article is not a puff piece. I included evidence of commercial and technical imperfection, to which I expect others to add. It includes a journal article. A successful but low-dollar performance in a crowdfunding effort is a relevant indicator. It tells about the company; it’s not sufficient reason to dump the article.

Notability: The subject attracted the attention of all the London tabloids, Fox, and various tech publications (29 by my count) worldwide. This was all in its first month of public operation. Is that notable? Yes. Is it ongoing? First, that’s not a requirement. Second, if it isn’t, it is still significant insofar as it it’s a reflection of an industry full of dreamers, as well as builders.

Specific to trains-in-tubes, Elon Musk built a test track in California: physical accomplishment. Hyperloop One built a demo system in Nevada: another physical accomplishment. ET3 Global Alliance: plans, papers, and press releases only. HTT: seminars and videos only. [[Hyperloop#Transpod |]]: three offices, no product. Arrivo: another startup, plans only. By the time we are done, the floor will be littered with the remains of companies that tried and failed. The story of those efforts, I believe, belong in an encyclopedia that should outlive all of us.

In the two days since this discussion started, two new companies were added to the Hyperloop page. There is something going on here. It needs to be documented.

Just my two cents. Rhadow (talk) 12:42, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

As to allegations of paid writing, COI, sockpuppetry, and support for less notable articles

I have had some free time over the last month. I have devoted it to Wikipedia. On balance, it has been great. I have indulged my interest in current events, creating ACLU v. Trump and Pence and Christie v. NCAA. I worked on old transportation related articles, including Port of New York and New Jersey. If you really want to know, you can click contributions.

After I had an article PRODded and another fall to AfD, I took an interest in the process. Aspiring editors are spending a long time developing first articles, only to be rejected in a number of ways, most impersonal and many without the courtesy of a personal note on their talk page. It takes some experience to determine who tagged your page. It takes even more to navigate one's way into the backroom discussions of sockpuppetry and COI. For me, it started with a discussion I had with a guy who was promoting his low budget horror film. I'm sure he had a few hours in it. The welcome messages he got from WP were upbeat. The treatment the article got was far different. He suffered cognitive dissonance. I gave that article a shot, but the outcome didn't change.

I worked on two bio pieces. One was a self-written promo piece for a guy on Wall Street. With work, I changed a cut-and-pasted resume to a reasonable piece. After this rant, I expect someone to stalk that one too. Oh well. Another was for a guy who showed up in the Teahouse with an article created by his professional association. If he had left well enough alone, it would have stayed forever. He edited it himself, then asked for help. I volunteered to help. At the end of the day, there isn't enough to support the page. It will be deleted soon.

Even the worst written, scantily referenced articles deserve a chance. An infobox, inline citations, and some English helps. I liken the work to that of a public defender. The clients may be odious, but they deserve a fair shake in court. Am I getting paid? No. My value analysis goes like this: why skulk around WP, when a straight-up job writing copy somewhere else would pay more? Someone is looking for boogeymen when they chase me for paid writing. I cannot speak for other others, who may make a living at this.

Sockpuppetry is an interesting topic. Sockpuppets are the logical and predictable result of a system that forces complete transparency within the confines of WP. Even one's sandbox and its history is visible. At the border of WP, the rules change. There is no limit to the number of identities one can create. WP's response is to look at IP addresses. Banks have gone a step further, looking at machine MAC addresses. In a curious parallel with current events, sockpuppet investigations go where the available tools lead. The current state of those tools is that they turn up false positives. Users fall prey to a logical fallacy; "You can never be too safe." Sure you can. In most countries, when an ER doc is faced with a dislocated shoulder, she resets it. In the U.S. it's an opportunity to call an orthopod for a consult and a set of CAT scans. Sometimes the cost of individual cases makes the entire system unworkable. To wit: the American healthcare system.

I reviewed the list of articles scheduled for deletion. Were there any that could be saved? It was work for Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. I ran into the Propane Puffery Association. It was truly a lost cause: one sided, pure promotion. The page was still in circulation with an invitation to help improve it. So I did. I added two sentences about the dangers of propane. In an article soon to go, it was a jarring change in tone. The editor monitoring the article for deletion was offended and wrote a vaguely accusatory entry about sockpuppetry. You can check my records. I don't have time to logout and log back in with another identity.

In each sphere of my WP involvement, I've attracted some interest by WP old hands. Some have read my stuff, rolled their eyes, and moved on. Others add my name to lists of miscreants reminiscent of the Hollywood Reporter lists of 1947. Once my name is there, the assumption is that "where there is smoke there is fire." Those lists are permanent.

WP thought-leaders would do well to lean back and consider the long-term effects of strict application of dozens of WP:XX guidelines. If they are applied as rules -- the way a district attorney would cite statute -- it's no wonder that people go to Upwork or the other groups advertising WP paid editing. They are cowed by the WP rules, and not without reason. This isn't Nupedia. They are afraid of being bold. Please, for me, remember, It is easier to be critical than creative. All the best Rhadow (talk) 11:34, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Copy of a post from Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Renamed_user_jC6jAXNBCg#Suspected_sockpuppets

Hello all -- I am Rhadow. I am a new and relatively inexperienced editor, but an enthusiastic one. I would like to thank the dozens of editors who have reached out to offer guidance.

I stand now before this tribunal whose allegations against me are sockpuppetry. The penalty is banishment from WP, and likely a block on the cable TV IP address from which my traffic emanates. Whether sockpuppetry is the real offense, I don't know. Perhaps is that I am daring beyond my seniority. It doesn't matter.

I have written on these topics before. My user page still exists. The text on the talk pages of deleted articles is gone for good. I shan't repeat that writing.

WP desires to have a community of committed volunteers. It perceives sockpuppetry and conflict of interest as anathema to that goal. It has therefore instituted strict guidelines against these activities and built tools to localize it. I suggest that in so doing, it has generated a great deal of zeal to ferret out and punish these offenders. The messages I have received from a few thoughtful Wikipedians have been empathetic. Others are far more zealous than the published guidelines and essays.

I realize now that my views are not close to the consensus. A community, if it is to be a community, must have divergent views in order to grow, in the same way a population must have mutations if it is to evolve. Mutations that are not useful result in early death and inability to reproduce. The WP analogy is that troublemakers have to go; free thinkers improve the system. We need a discussion about troublemakers. We need to differentiate between a tolerated healthy dissenter and candidate for exile.

I look at the reasoning in the discussion about me. I use the expression "two cents." It is a common enough colloquialism that its use is hardly worthy of mention, except perhaps as violation of encyclopedic writing. Instead, it is woven into a circumstantial argument that includes other observations that, on their own, are equally difficult to justify. I referred to another editor, one who is involved in a political edit war, this way, "and I'm sure the editor is male". It's my opinion, based on the vitriol of his (or her, as the case may be) comments. On the basis of a single comment, and a cross-tabulation against other users who have also used the "two cents" colloquialism, I am linked to four other users who have done the same. In statistics, this is called data-dredging. One can use this technique to ascribe specious correlations to any number of disparate occurrences.

In another allegation, I am accused of "having a theory" about WP. Argue with me please about the theory. Don't use it to prove that I am a sockpuppet for someone who expressed the same notion. I use the em-dash as part of my standard salutation. It is my consistent habit for decades. To claim that this behavior links me to another is preposterous. In a population as large as WP, the chance of finding a block-new account pair within a month of one another is so high as to be meaningless.

WP's effort to combat sockpuppetry and COI will inevitably result in innocent parties being wrongly accused and the work of unwitting editors who worked on articles created by miscreants being discarded. The question before you is whether the cost of the mistakes justifies the benefit of creating an "orderly society." In the outside world, we have constitutional, statutory, and jury-provided protections for the accused. WP doesn't work that way. Evidence and testimony is deleted with suspect pages. Allegations are permanent. There is no obligation for anyone to respond to a defendant's statement. I know this isn't a court. Nevertheless, the objective should still be fairness.

Am I the only one? Probably not. My protests were used to link me to other editors, as if a similar observation is proof of some connection. I argue not. A business may know a lot about its customers, but it knows relatively little about the prospects who never became customers. WP needs new editors, if only to clean up the backlog of slightly flawed articles. There are only three solutions as I see it: relax the standards for articles, tone down the criticism of imperfect editors, or seek to recruit more editors from which to select the best. To improve the quality of the library, one might consider wholesale deletion of old imperfect articles, but that would discount the work of thousands of volunteers who created and improved those pages in good faith.

I feel like Clarence Gideon, who, without a lawyer, was found guilty of breaking into a pool hall. Without the help of any advocate, he pled his case to the Supreme Court of the United States. The result was the line you hear on every police procedural, "if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you." I read the Orangemoody essay. Asking people to come to conclusions based on behavioral evidence is a slippery slope. The danger of groupthink in this instance scares me. Prosecuting an inchoate offense requires a judgement about state of mind. That's pretty hard to judge based solely on WP edits and talk comments.

Let us say, arguendo, that my flaw is overly daring and bad writing. It's a lot easier to get a consensus agreement that I need to go based on charges of sockpuppetry and COI, using the tools for combating copyright violations (deletions of the talk pages where a defense was made) than to outright say, "your edits are simply below the WP standard." It is a convenient way to flush the unwanted editors. The rules for speedy delete give admins the ability to flush an editor's unwanted work and the defenses that went with it. With the secret privileges like UC come a higher obligation to justice.

I trust the people who look through the IP logs to see that no other users' traffic comes from my address. I trust the people who review my edits to see that despite the unfortunate use of cliche, I am not the alter ego of another user. I trust the people who contact the subjects of various articles to discover that they don't know me, much less have a commercial relation with me.

You have two choices: to banish me or to tolerate a member of the community who challenges you to make WP better. A decision against me will have longer-lasting effects than elimination of one non-conforming editor. It will energize the search for people like me and result in a closed community that discourages new entrants and divergent viewpoints.

The defense rests. Rhadow (talk) 15:56, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

The five pillars after almost two decades

Wikipedia is probably the most successful crowdsourcing effort in history. With five million articles in English and three million edits per month, it's a tribute to the efforts of its editors who work generally unsupervised. Without specific rules, it has collected and curated information about many of the species of known organisms, chemical compounds, named habitated places, and professional athletes. That's a reflection of what English-speaking humans find important to them. Unlike printed encyclopedias, it includes synopses of individual television episodes and video games It reflects a popular sensibility beyond the matters of academic interest when transcription and printing were prohibitively expensive. The unsupervised nature of the work means that the emphasis goes to new articles and articles of current interest. Without the discipline of a command structure, a million English articles, twenty percent, remain in a flawed condition. Often, a work to repair or delete such an article will be met with resistance. The age of a tag is no particular stimulus to action. As a result, there are articles from 2006 that need work.

Perhaps an example will demonstrate. Sarawak FM is a state-owned radio station transmitting in Malay. There is precious little press in English about it. It's not surprising that that there are no references available. So what to do about this stub lying around for ten years? We need to go back to the five pillars. WP is an encyclopedia, not a list. Perhaps, it is simply not notable to an English-speaking readership. The fifth pillar says Wikipedia has no rules. With that in mind, the transmitter power of the station, a relatively uncontroversial datum, need not be a matter requiring proof from a third party. What to do about it? We could delete it. After all, the page gets only five looks per day. Or we could simply delete the tags demanding better references. A third option is to consult our fellow wikipedians in the Malay language and ask if the station is important to them. If it's not important in Malay, it's certainly not important in English.

A result of the unsupervised nature of our work is that it is easier to be critical than creative. I tried to address an article about a 1970's vintage motorcycle Suzuki GT550. The original charge was that the technical specifications were cut-n-pasted. Personally, I find tech specs uncontroversial. Yes, they probably came from the manufacturer. No one else is likely to measure the bore and stroke of the engine, then publish it. They are what they are. The designers of the motorcycle infobox say that engine power and top speed number from the manufacturer are inherently suspect. OK, I get that. When I tried to remove the fanboy tag, though, it was immediately reverted by an editor who demanded some level of writing that I was unable to understand or achieve. A review of that editor's contributions shows a pattern of similar reversions demanding higher performance. The problem from my standpoint is that there was no example of what was expected. How would I know when to stop working on this article? The result is that this article went back into the pile of a million to which someone had objected, but was unwilling to devote time to improve to meet their standard. In a community as large as WP, the power to veto, blackball or revert is a blunt weapon exercised on guilty and innocent alike.

With time, WP discovered that paid writers and sockpuppets gamed the system, shoehorning articles of dubious encyclopedic quality. Wales probably did not predict that WP would be regarded as an authoritative source. It has. That's why there are so many mirrors of it. Chasing after paid editors and sockpuppets became a cause celebre among a small but active group of editors. They forgot that the objective is the creation of a quality encyclopedia. The quality of a paid editors' work was no longer the point. The action was in the chase and prosecution. The debate over paid editors will go on in other fora. The process of pursuing these miscreants has reached fever pitch as my story above illustrates. What is dissatisfying to me is the lack of closure. Thousands of keystrokes are spent making accusations, accusation that stay on the record forever. The record is curiously silent after no concrete evidence is found. Even after the CU had determined no malfeasance, other editors bring up the old accusations in reviews of my edits.

My edits need criticism. I do my best to chase down articles cut-n-pasted from other sources. Often I fail. It's tough. A WP article is is echoed throughout the Internet. The original source of the article may disappeared completely. You just know that an article was copied from somewhere, a printed book, someone's term paper, or a forgotten web-site. I understand when someone justifies an article that is a mashup of other WP articles. That doesn't mean it wasn't plagiarized originally. I think the effort suffers when that copy is imported without any of its history. In the echo chamber of WP mirrors, an unsourced fact has the ability to find its way into an article unquestioned. I cite the example of an article about a village in India Toolihalan. Google maps shows the road named after the village, but not the village itself. Indian government documents describe a primary school named for the village, or it might have been named for a local dignitary for whom the village, apart, was also named. Frankly, the existence of a village of a hundred people is hard to substantiate in English. The governments of India and Pakistan are willing to sell you maps and census that may or may not describe the village. There is simply no way for an English speaking Googler to know. As in the case of Malay radio station, perhaps this one is best left to the editors of the Urdu edition of WP. This, I am sure, was not in the mind of the creators of the project two decades ago.

The question of multiple languages arose again in my edits of an article about a Kosovar artist Ramadan Ramadani. As the websites that support his references die, one by one, we are left with a single Youtube interview in Albanian, which TV interview was rejected. The logical action is to pose the question to an Albanian speaker. If the evidence supports an article about the artist in Albanian, then we can consider an English article. I believe personally that this artist is notable. Without Albanian support, the article will eventually disappear into the night and fog.

No one anticipated that WP might become the source for the newspaper articles that are our references. This article Georgia Cyclone predates a July 17, 2017 newspaper piece about the roller coaster that includes wording suspiciously similar to our article. And so the cycle goes: newspaper sources citing WP citing newspapers.

One might chalk up the unintended consequences of growth and success to wikilawyering. In my view. wikilawyering is a symptom, not a cause. Some editors (and I expect it's a small number) revel in the power that quoting WP:AbCd has over the less bold. My suggestion is that an article should be based on the best available references, not a rigid application of guidelines as strict rules. A patent record is perfectly good proof of the existence of a patent and its inventor. I agree that it is not proof of efficacy of the device. A manufacturer's website is a perfectly legitimate source for the bore and stroke of a motorcycle engine. I leave it to the editor to use judgement. It's an abuse of power to criticize an editor's judgement without offering a suggestion of how to do it better.

A return to five pillars would help the project. Rhadow (talk) 16:14, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

What red links tell us

After two decades, most of the obvious articles have been written: the presidents, the elements, and the counties of the world. Sports fans are writing the biographies of every batsman who stepped onto a professional pitch. Music fans seek to build an entry for every garage band who cut a demo. Every chemical compound gets an entry, as does every species of flora and fauna.

Human organizations get strict scrutiny. Trade organizations and startup companies want to use the authority of WP to build their brands. Twenty years ago no one predicted that the most popular search engine would automagically use WP to populate a first search page resume of the search term. It's no wonder small organizations fight tooth and nail to establish an article in their names. That fight will go on. What frustrates me is when a team of eighty quantum physicists cannot sustain a page. "It's not notable," say opponents. Wait! A single fast-bowler gets in and a team eighty scientists do not? Something is wrong.

Red links are the gravestones of article that existed before and are gone now. I'm on a tear to describe desegregation in United States schools. I open an article and see six red links. They might have been made accidentally, but I doubt it. Six articles describing politicians, closed schools, and citizen's groups are simply gone.

There are problems with letting the crowd guide the development of the encyclopedia.

Sports, music, and entertainment dominate the new pages.
Topics are duplicated
Time is wasted rewriting the same articles

If WP were commercially run, the limitation of resources would prevent article sections from being written twice. A resource-constrained organization would think twice before tossing an article in the dustbin.

WP is not commercially driven. The question is whether editor involvement or production of the encyclopedia is more important. The WP mission is ambiguous on the topic. If the time of editors is an unlimited free resources, then there is no harm in letting them write and rewrite the same articles. There is no harm in developing an article on every professional athlete. If the goal is an encyclopedia that explains our world, we might want to concentrate on capturing human history in politics and social interactions. What happens in the courts in 2017 is more likely to affect life in 2067 than who wins the World Series. No question, it's more fun to write about one's favorite golfer than land-use law affecting golf courses.

How do you influence the behavior of editors -- harnessing their incredible talent to work on cleaning what we have, rather than developing a hundred articles a day that are swiftly deleted? It would be interesting to discover how many times an article on Acme Startup has been written and rejected. Filling in an empty red link serves the encyclopedia better. We need to figure out a way to give barnstars to people who perfect the encyclopedia rather than adding more pages.

I'm all ears. I'd like to hear ideas and responses.

It doesn't feel right to edit another user's Talk Page, but you did invite comments. You make some very valid points, and I especially like the idea of removing content and putting it somewhere like the 'wiki-basement' - a place place where it can't be found by any search engines or normal wikipedia searches, but can be found and 'reworked' possibly and brought back to life by other editors in the future if circumstances changes. (e.g. if those physicists take up golf and win a tournament!). (Libellous, offensive and downright false tosh excluded, of course) Feel free to move/delete this if you wish Nick Moyes (talk) 23:02, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

Why the rush to get an article published

Every day, we dump hundreds of articles about small business that are not notable, promotion, or advertising. That's likely thousands of hours of effort to create articles - and likely thousands of dollars worth of paid editorial time we never notice. Why?

WP is the victim of its own success. Google figures a perfect match is worth a text box in the upper right corner of a results screen with the WP lede. The lucky business gets a billing better than number one in the search results. It comes with the implied endorsement of WP and Google both. Their time and money is better spent trying to get a WP article than gaming the the Google search engine (SEO). Once an article in published in WP, dozens of copies are spawned all over the web. It's no wonder the arguments are so heated to keep an article from being deleted.

Articles without limit

I worry about certain families of articles that may include members almost without limit, most of which are not notable (lower case en). I am not so much interested in every local football club and dart-throwing champion. I know it gives fans great pleasure to record the bios of team members and annual records. Likewise for bands that have released one CD, and for every CD of the more prolific ones. Where organizations, place names, and technical terms are concerned, we risk expansion of the encyclopedia to an extent that its usability decrease. Sometimes there just is too much information. Here are some scary categories:

new varieties of digital currency and block chains for every conceivable purpose
each command in UNIX and every other computer language
each new galaxy as discovered
every startup with a million dollars and ten people
every named place, inhabited or not, on the planet
every railroad and subway station
every chain restaurant with ten or more stores

How effective is NPP?

One experienced Wikipedian wrote, "We're actually pretty good at catching corporations at NPP. AfD and PROD are the area where it gets tricky because like I said above, the GNG can be argued on either side for most English-speaking corporations."

I'm not so sure about that. Take a look at List of Y Combinator startups. These folks have the art of review down to a science. They know not to include employee counts or VC dollars invested, at least not in the first few days. Then the article is supported by references from the likes of Techcrunch. Eventually it has a WP presence and the standards that would normally be applied at NPP are forgotten. Here is a great example: ReadyForZero. When you look under the covers it was a startup with a $260K investment in 2010. By 2016, a buyer had shut it down completely. I edited to change the voice to past tense. When looked at through the lens of today, it was a failed startup that cost its investors $5 million. Probably not notable at the time or in retrospect. I would lose my hand, though if I pushed it to the center of a deletion discussion.

A more recent example is UpCodes which passed review, and when prodded, whose author claimed that the Y Combinator website (its VC-incubator) was a reliable source. Just as bold, I think, was the claim that Curbed was a reliable source, when it, in turn, scraped its piece from TechCrunch.

In the absolute horseshit pile is Immunity Project which should be categorized as CRIME. It's not clear quite who these people are. It claims to be a non-profit, but it is relying on an existing charity's IRS registration. Forty-one percent of its spending is on salaries. It took in $861K in 2015, while spending only $292K. It put a cool half million in the bank. Some charity. The article says the organization is doing HIV/AIDS research. The for-profit research company says it experimented on a hundred mice. To be clear, it was experimentation on adjuvants used with microsphere vaccine delivery, not work on an HIV/AIDS vaccine per se. Even if it were, to provide a free HIV vaccine will take another billion or so to carry it though human trials. We WP editors sure got suckered on this one, letting a SPA publish a promo piece for a charity that isn't very charitable. We shoulda known. The initial article described Phase 1 Clinical Trials.[1] That means tests on healthy test subjects. Rhadow (talk) 16:52, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Article deletion is a good thing

The reason we trust academic journals is that the editors refuse to publish worthless articles and send the flawed ones back for rework. The reason we like news magazines is that editors pick the twenty most important articles every week, saving readers the waste of time of reading trivia. The same standards apply to WP. We give the reader the best value for reading time when we provide a single cogent article on each notable topic. We waste a readers time when we provide two articles that address the same material. Here are some examples of duplicative articles:

For reasons that baffle me, editors hate the idea of deleting articles. When there are two articles treating the same material one has to be better than the other. I don't understand why we insist on retaining second-rate articles. Likewise for content forks that have too much material in the main article or trivia in the subsidiary article. Here are some examples:

There is no deadline

When I PROD an article, a common response is There is no deadline. Forget that There is no deadline is not a policy, but only an essay. An article unreferenced for ten years either has no reliable references, undiscovered or not, or no one cares. If no one cares, then the topic is not notable.

There are pockets of topics supported by intransigent editors, though, who feel that their area of expertise requires requires no references. To them, I guess, the truth of the articles is self evident. These articles are encyclopedic and well written, for the most part. The problem is that there is no evidence that anyone is fact-checking them. I leave out dart-throwers, books, and record albums. The biggest collections of unreferenced articles fall into several families:

Yachting and boats
Computer science
Building trades
Samurai warriors
Telecommunications
Railway stations

Faith v. Evidence ... as it applies to Wikipedia

We seem to have two families of editors here at Wikipedia as we have two preferences for bible stories and evolution. We won't settle the matter in our lifetimes, but we should at least recognize both as we develop and follow editing policy.

The faith-based editors rely on WP:NODEADLINE and WP:GOODFAITH to retain articles and add articles about every cricketer who stepped onto a professional pitch. If our goal is to capture the sum of human knowledge, they are completely in the right. We take the risk of incorrect data, but we will never lose any potentially important story.

The evidence-based editors demand proof of notability, often arguing with a hundred times as many words as the assertion that goes into the article. They believe that fewer articles, each compact enough to be useful to a lay reader, is more important than the quantity or size of articles.

Rather than writing more essays and developing more policy, we should focus our attention on the five pillars, the first princples of what makes a valuable online encyclopedia. Rhadow (talk) 14:46, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

Fuzzy policies and the privilege of editing

North8000 wrote, "Wikipedia policies by necessity are a bit fuzzy, and often don't prohibit practices that are counter to the intent. A good plan is to also keep the intent in mind rather than going to the limits of what is not prohibited or other extremes."

Well then perhaps it is valuable to return to first principles: (1) the value of an encyclopedia, and (2) the joy of creation. An encyclopedia needs to be reliable. That's why we insist on verifiability and NPOV. It needs to be fun to create, or the crowdsourcing model wouldn't work. For many, the work of collecting and inserting references is too great. They just want the fun of original research. When challenged, they get their hackles up and we see evidence of man's inhumanity toward man. I believe that the encyclopedia is in danger if we don't balance the two. If we don't the result will be a book with unreferenced articles with gems of assertions like this:
"In most other countries, fire chiefs are rarely assigned their own marked vehicles, but instead use unmarked vehicles.
The fuzzy nature of the policies, without the good judgement that goes along with them, leads to arguments like this, "Here are four citations from mainstream magazines, ergo the topic is notable." Balderdash. With the privilege of editing come the responsibility to do it well. Rhadow (talk) 13:49, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

It is not clear to me what point you are trying to make. And I think that the negative description you gave of an editor is is very uncommon for anyone who is engaged to the point of having these types of discussions. I'm not commenting on the particular case because I think that it does need better sourcing. My thought about intent in this case is following the spirit of "......likely to be challenged" which I think that means that someone has some concern about the verifiability (veracity) of the statement. They just need to have such a question or concern....they don't need to have expertise to base the concern on, nor expertise to argue for that concern, they just need to sincerely have and express the concern and not do anything further than that.

Though I think that we are seeing things a bit differently, thanks for the enjoyable and useful engagement on this. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:41, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

Editor

WP:OTHERSTUFFISBULLSHIT

In the myriad list of arguments we are asked not to make about notability comes WP:OTHERSTUFF -- that comparison of the notability of existing or deleted articles should not be considered in the instant discussion. If the purpose of Wikipedia is to build an encyclopedia, we need a baseline for notability. We need to learn from our mistakes, remember them, and not make them again. The time-proven method is precedent. Yes, it's a term from law. Before you reject my line of reasoning, calling me a wikilawyer, hear me out.

The second reason for Wikipedia's existence is recreation for its editors. Based on the amount of effort I see devoted to debate of AfDs, I appreciate that editors get a lot of satisfaction from penning their arguments for and against particular articles, with the number of keystrokes and references exceeding those in the articles they are discussing. If that is what makes the community happy, we should be honest with ourselves and accept it. Having accepted it, we could revel in it. I don't.

Building a baseline criteria for what constitutes a notable article cannot come from policies and essays alone. It must come from the wisdom we draw from the arguments that have been made previously. In law, it's called precedent. It assures that the decision a court takes are equitable between cases of various kinds and, within a country, between various regions.

Take, for example, the recurring debates over small restaurant chains. Over and over, every week, the argument is repeated, with different food, a different number of stores, and a different geographic scope. One day, it's chicken, the next it's kebabs, and a day later, biscuits. When the topic is frozen custard, we hear that the topic is not food, but the unique culture of the city in which the stand is located. At the end of the day, it's the same argument. Editors fight to keep a restaurant chain in. The owners are happy when it does, it gives them the top right spot in a Google search.

Ask yourself how important a restaurant chain is to an encyclopedia. The first chain restaurant, Howard Johnson's opened in 1925. The last one closed in 2017. It's notable; it was a pioneer. It was the first franchise. After not a hundred years, the book is closed on that story. Now consider whether a chicken restaurant with four stores Hattie B's Hot Chicken belongs in an encyclopedia. The Nashville fans will gather around, newspapers in hand, claiming a page 26 article from the style section is press coverage. We've lost our minds, conflating a mention with an article. We confuse a city editor's choice of space filler with our own good judgement of what belongs in an encyclopedia. The discussions at AfD center on the quality and quantity of sources, rather than the real question, does it belong?

Every AfD suggestion becomes a special pleading. If every case is special, then none is standard. If one knew, going into a deletion discussion, what the outcome would be, then fewer cases would need argument. Bold editing and PRODS would discharge most cases. But how would we know? We'd have to retain data about the decision made earlier. Today we rely on institutional memory. In a community of 32 million, that's probably the worst approach. There are a couple of possibilities here: for every case gone by, keep track of how many restaurants, dollar sales, years in business and the keep-or-delete outcome. No! People will argue about what data to record. Here is another idea. Feed each article into a neural net and train the machine on what the humans decided. At the end of the day, the machine will be able to predict what the jury would decide. A neural net can look at a photograph and figure out whether it's a mole or a cancer better than a human. It'll work on a Wikipedia article.

Repeated arguments over sources

If we don't go the neural net route, then we need to keep track of the of the arguments used in previous decisions. That way we don't need to conduct exactly the same argument over and over. Our arguments often devolve into discussions not into the notability of the subject, but the reliability of the source. In the last couple of days I engaged in a discussion of notability of a living person profiled by KYW Radio and the Philadelphia Daily News. Both were rejected with the claim that the sources were local. The KYW piece was rejected because it was backed up by a 22 minute video of the original interview.

If we would record the outcome of those discussions, we wouldn't have to repeat them. As it stands now, the standard we apply to a source is dependent on who shows up to the AfD discussion. In another discussion last week, we had an article supported fourteen times by articles from the Casper (WY) Star-Tribune. If the Philadelphia Daily News is an insufficient source, where does that put the Casper Star-Tribune?

We could standardize our approach to press outlets, or we could allow the various arguments in different realms to continue, coming to different conclusions, based on who shows up at the AfD. The first smells of wikilawyering and an injection of bureaucracy that many, I'm sure, don't want. The second means that we will enjoy many more debates, and articles relegated to the dustbin, taking the work of many editors with it. The third is to be more clear about what standards we apply to the subject itself, not procedural arguments about the types and voice of the the reference material.

Wildly divergent standards in different realms.

Look compare the standards we apply to the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania ACLU and cricket players. In the case of the first, Reggie Shuford is rejected with, "[The] state director of a national organization is not notable." On the other hand, a cricket player L. Dinaparna whose first name is unknown, is an acceptable article with two database listings describing a single first-class appearance. This disparity of standards is ludicrous. It shows why WP:OTHERSTUFF is bullshit. A comparison of a particular article with existing articles is a perfectly legitimate approach.

WP:GNG is a crutch

When WP:IMPORTANT was superseded, the encyclopedia lost an important principle -- that editors should use good judgement about what is appropriate content for an encyclopedia. Instead, there was substituted policy that describes the qualities of sources that should be relied upon to substantiate an article. We are foregoing our individual right to think and putting the onus on newspaper editors and book publishers to decide what is important for us.

What topics appear n the press today are not what will be importnt to see in an encyclopedia a year or a decade from now. The biographies of academics and lawyers are seldom covered in the press. An analysis in a hundred years will show that they have effected more change than the soap opera star of 2017. As a result of WP:GNG, it's a lot easier to create and defend an article about a screen queen than a legal eagle.

The value of an encyclopedia derived from two sources: the quality of its content (what's there is correct and cogent) and its curation (what is not important is not there). Our trend, because we are not limited by the amount of paper it takes to print wikipedia, is the compilation of trivia that distracts the reader from getting to the point.

School is a great example. There is only a limited amount of stuff a student can cover in eight or eighteen years of schooling. Therefore teachers and textbook writers need to use judgement about what goes into the syllabus. Shakespeare goes in, because he was the first example of modern English and coined so many expressions we used today. We skip Christopher Marlow and Thomas Kid. Students learn about Einstein, but not one in a hundred learns about Minkowski or Dirac.

In a hundred years, people will still likely know Frank Sinatra and Enrico Caruso as singers. None will remember the vocal careers of William Shatner or Leonard Nimoy. If they discover recordings, they will ask why anyone kept them. A retrospective view will show that Caruso's voice was great, but his career coincided with the advent of the record player. There had been many great tenors before him, but we rely on solely on writings that describe their voices.

Every day Wikipedians argue about the merits of a four-store chicken restaurant chain or a frozen custard stand. It's easy, there is always a newspaper reporter hoping to fill some space. A chicken-lover get it in her head to write an article, and there you go -- another unimportant chicken restaurant described for posterity.

What is an important chain of restaurants? Howard Johnson's is. It was the first. McDonalds is. It pioneered the idea of making the real estate the business, not the hamburger. Is there much to be learned from the stories of Burger Chef or Hardees? I argue not. Nevertheless, editors root through newspapers and travel guides to justify a plethora of articles that leave a reader no more informed at the end than at the start. The trivia buffs are happy, though.

If trivia is the future of Wikipedia, perhaps we should consider renaming it, Wikipedia, the encyclopedia of popular culture. Then we wouldn't have to be concerned when organizations of 15,000 or 300,000 members are proposed for deletion.

WP is not the Social Register

A biography may include a range of facts about the subject: whom she married, what books she wrote, or her heinous crimes. A WP:BLP isn't an excuse to describe each of the companies she founded, how much her house sold for, who else starred in her movies, or who her fifth cousin is.

It's enough to say that Jackie is a real estate investor. As soon as I hear how many square feet were in one of her projects, that article is soon to see a broad red pen.

The articles that get my goat are the ones that assume the subject achieved notability by being a member of the lucky sperm club. She picked her parents well or caught a great husband or three. A recitation of who all the famous people she air-kisses drives me crazy.

You can't let emotion influence your editing job. Dissect the article, assertion by assertion. The article says she's an art collector. Fine. Are the works notable? Not the artist, the works themselves. On a charity board? Honorary chair or trustee? Not notable. Changed the organization? Okay. Professors are definitely notable. Adjunct professors, not so much. Lots of people make movies. Few make good ones. Being a rich producer of bad movies is no more notable than being a starving filmmaker. If none of the assertions qualify as notable, then the article probably doesn't qualify under WP:GNG.

Look for quotes in the article. Unless the subject is a writer or public speaker, quotes are usually color in a drab article. They turn biography to check-out fare. Remember, Wikipedia is not a tabloid ... or Architectural Digest, the same thing, but for rich people.

From perspective of an encyclopedia, a single mention of each relative is likely enough. If the person is not notable, the article is not an excuse to provide a mini-bio. If the person is notable, then the blue-linked article will provide the necessary detail. There is no purpose served by duplicating details in two or three or more places in Wikipedia. Subsequent marriages of spouses, grandchildren, and second cousins are not relevant.

Be skeptical. Where the subject went to college is one thing. The claim of graduation magna cum laude or summa cum laude is likely made more often than it is referenced. Strip the article to its skeleton assertions about the subject. You will soon discover how much of the article is assertions about other people, houses, and companies. It fills the page, but tells nothing about the subject. It's got to go. Then make your own decision as to whether it can support the mantle of notability. Making an article shorter is a favor to every reader. If you decide to take an article to AfD, your fellow editors will appreciate how much easier their decision is.

Musings two years in

Hello SMcCandlish, I want to thank you for your thoughts on the twenty-one varieties of English in Wikipedia. I have been an editor for two years. My impression is that the original goal of WP, to create a crowdsourced version of the Encyclopedia Britannica has been successful. For those articles that would make a print edition, WP has been spectacular. Articles of general interest about people, places, and proceedings are generally well curated. In other corners, special interest groups have disregarded the rules in their own clubhouses to create articles for every Sri Lankan cricketer and cartoon episode ever made. The rules for notability and reliability go out the window. The result is a diminution of the value of the good articles, casting a shadow on their notability and objectivity. This peculiar obsession with regional languages is similar. {{Indian English}} isn't a distinct species of dialect; it is a breed, simply a topic to be argued over but never settled. My take is that Indian English, or Trinidadian English or Lilliputian English is like pornography. It exists only in the eyes of the beholder. I recall the words of Associate Justice Potter Stewart:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. 378 U.S. at 197 (Stewart, J., concurring) (emphasis added).

It's a fight that an individual cannot win. The Sri Lankan cricket fans and language nationalists bring enthusiasm to the fight that is unmatched by bystanders. The methods they use are proven -- to escalate the issue and increase the work required that the effort becomes thankless. I am going through the same with railroad stations. The implicit presumption is that all rail stops are notable. Once that is established, there is not longer a requirement for quality in those articles. That there are 2,000 stub articles about Indian railway stations (a quarter of all railway stations in the country) is irrelevant. Now that the essential articles have mostly all been written for WP, all that we can look forward to is collection of more trivia. lists, templates, and categories. What say you? Rhadow (talk) 12:47, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Linguists would tell you that things like Sri Lankan English and Zimbabwean English are in fact dialects (or dialect continuums, especially in large and diverse countries like India, where English is tinged with influences on a regional basis from non-English native languages, many of which are not even in the same langauge families). What they are not are written standards of formal English. There really are only "two and a half", as it were: "British" (general Commonwealth) and American, which are well-codified, and Canadian, which is subject to dispute at all levels (the Canadian dictionaries and style guides contradict each other, and studies of national usage show a lot of variety). All the rest are basically "British" English with some local/regional influences like particularly Australian or Irish or Trinidadian or whatever vocabulary words thrown in.

Your broader point: I agree. There's a close relationship between wanting to declare articles to be in Jamaican English or whatever and wanting to write articles on non-notable Jamaican people and things; it's part of a poisonous habit of nationalistic thinking (if you can call it thinking; more like feeling). It's a broad problem and the solutions to it are not really clear. Plus there is a legitimate tension, on the content-subjects side, between inappropriate nationalism/regionalism/localism on the one hand and the WP:BIAS problem on the other, in which too much of our content is about the US and the UK.

But that's primarily a quality not quantity problem. We don't need new articles on 10,000 South Asian or Latin American actors to try to "catch up" to the level of bios of American and British actors. The latter are more apt to be notable because American and British TV shows and movies make the rounds internationally several orders of magnitude more than filmic works in Chilean Spanish or the Kannada language of India. Rather, the problem is that we are missing bios on key people and other major subjects in "third world" countries, and where we do have them they are almost always low-detail summaries compared to similar articles on UK or US topics (e.g., pick any article on a head of state or a city of the UK and compare it to an article on a head of state or a city of Eritrea or Honduras or Madagascar). Same goes for the M/F split. It's not that we need a zillion more articles on female scientists and businesspeople, but more on the important ones, and more information in the articles we do have already on such people. It's not WP's job to "correct" the world's imbalance in favor of males making the news more often, or BBC TV and Hollywood movies getting more global distribution, etc.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:52, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Quality not quantity problem

SMcCandlish, I fell into this pit as a result of looking at railway station articles. One cranky editor told me to create a specific Indian school article instead of pursuing the mountainous issue of atrocious railway station stub articles. In so doing, I discovered another huge set of weak articles. Two decades in, there is still a bias towards new articles on Indian railway stations and schools over the quality of the existing ones. India has 8,500 railway stations. Two thousand eight hundred have articles in the mainspace, of which 2,000 are stubs. Of those, there are several hundred that are candidates for #REDIRECT. The editors who will argue against are the same ones who will cry "cultural bias" and {{Use Indian English}}. The failed message is that poor quality articles reflect badly on and reduce the authority of the good ones. Rhadow (talk) 16:04, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

I bet that Dicklyon would agree, too. We frequently encounter WP:OWN-ish behavior when it comes to rail-connected topics, and it's clear that we have far too many wannabe-articles on rail-cruft. As with schools below the collegiate/university level, there's a strong argument to merge many of these into articles on the larger systems to which they belong. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:28, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes, but there are lots of areas dominated by large numbers of poor stubs. One does what one can. Dicklyon (talk) 16:42, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Hello Dicklyon, thanks for the encouragement. My perception of the rail cluster is similar to the cricket players cluster. By a curious twist, a player who makes a single appearance for a Sri Lanka regional team is eligible for an article. In both cases a small but motivated group defends the entire category, including the crap articles. I believe that the Schools decision opens the door for a more reasonable approach to generally but not universally notable subjects. In many cases, the protectors of these articles like the fight more than the work of fixing articles. I think logic may prevail at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hapa Road railway station. That would be significant.

You recommend that we do what we can. The pessimistic view is that it isn't much. The positive view is that a long journey starts with a single step. Rhadow (talk) 18:04, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Task

Drafting a policy that would be accepted by the community isn't easy, but consensus can be changed. The best we can do is show the problem that exists, and the solution to that problem. In order to fine tune the criteria, find articles from stub class that you would keep, and figure out how a policy would separate those from the ones you definitely wouldn't. There's no rush, come back to this in six months if you wish; sandbox7 ain't gonna go anywhere and its open 24/7 365 days a year. Cesdeva ^(talk) 00:56, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

So, Cesdeva, you agree that inductive argument (one with examples) is a necessary accompaniment to the deductive arguments. Lemme cogitate on that. Rhadow (talk) 15:46, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Don't cogitate too much, you may start to hear a rattle. Cesdeva ^(talk) 21:03, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Dubious assertions about disability accommodation

The railway station infobox includes a field ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) which is generally interpreted outside the U.S. as whether the station has facilities to accommodate persons with disabilities. Many stations have had a handicapped icon added in the field without reference. As a policy matter, this assertion should be supported by reference, else a reader might be led to an incorrect conclusion. As a practical matter, in many cases, photos of the station show stairs, particularly in the case of foot over bridges, with no ramp or elevator visible. Escalators and stairs are handicapped-unfriendly. Rhadow (talk) 13:31, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Listcruft in railway station articles

Many Indian railway station articles include a list of every train passing the station. When these lists include day-of-week or schedule information, they are summarily edited out. Lists of trains do not add value to the articles. If a traveler wanted to know what trains serve a station and a destination, Indiarailinfo would deliver current schedule information. Wikipedia would supply only incomplete or outdated information. To say that a train stops at a station in both directions is superfluous. Almost all do. Yes, it would be noteworthy if a train only stopped in one direction. The result of these lists is an enormous number of wikilinks.

Similarly, to say that a station is well connected to a [list of other stations] is similarly superfluous. In a nationwide network, all stations are connected. It might be valuable to say that the following stations are accessible without changing trains, but no articles go into this level of detail. Rhadow (talk) 13:43, 10 March 2019 (UTC)