On 2007.12.20 04:04:24 -0700, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> scribbled 5.2K
characters:
A long while ago I noticed that there were articles
for most episodes
from the "Scrubs" TV show, a very popular comedy series. They were
mostly quite detailed, with comprehensive infoboxes and standardized
sections, very far from "revoltingly bad". They were poorly categorized
so I created [[category:Scrubs episodes]] and spent an hour or so
tidying everything up, then moved on with other things since I don't
watch the series myself.
A few days back I got an automated notice that category:Scrubs episodes
was up for speedy deletion because it was empty. I see now that pretty
much every episode article has been wiped out and redirected to the
"list of Scrubs articles", which has only the barest minimum of
information about each episode in it. Wikipedia has drastically reduced
the amount of information it carries about this series. This has been
happening a lot, check the history of pretty much any "list of <foo>
episodes" article and you'll see a massive surge of redirects and link
removals in recent months. I imagine some group of editors must have
managed to make some change to a notability guideline somewhere and are
now using it to cut a swath of destruction through such articles.
In one case I came across an article for an episode of a TV series that
had been based on a much more obscure play of the same name. The article
on the TV episode had been wiped and redirected. So I salvaged some
material from the article's history to create an article about the
_play_, and that article appears to be perfectly acceptable. I guess
plays are "literary", and therefore not as easily tarred with the
fancruft brush even though this one's not nearly as widely known as the
"non-notable" episode that was based on it.
It's not just for articles about individual episodes. Recently the
article about the main antagonist organization in the science fiction TV
series Farscape, the "Peacekeepers," got deleted after a weak AfD with
three keep votes and four delete votes. The rest of the articles about
various details of the Farscape series started collapsing like a house
of cards after that. I notice that one of the few survivors that's still
up for AfD, [[Command_Carrier]], has as part of its nomination the
comment "Many other Farscape articles have been AfD'ed since, and all
that's clear is that they have been abandoned by fandom". Well, duh. Why
should fans of Farscape bother spending any further effort on improving
Wikipedia articles when so much of their work is just being arbitrarily
swept away?
I also notice a number of "merge and delete" votes in that AfD. In fact,
it looks like the deletion that started this all was a merge-and-delete
case as well; material from [[Peacekeeper (Farscape)]] got put into
[[Races in Farscape]]. I'm restoring the history. I don't delve into AfD
often, are "merge and delete" votes really this common in general over
there? If so that's a serious problem, it's riddling Wikipedia with
copyvios.
A good idea for Google would be to have some mechanism to make it easy
to import a Wikipedia article into a Knol complete with edit history.
That'd allow this work to be transwikied over there and saved, and
Google would get the content and the eyeballs that Wikipedia's throwing
away. Win for our contributors, win for Google.
Yes, there's a definite [[chilling effect]] going on here. I won't go so far as to
say that this is the deliberate end of such editors' actions (for all that
"picking off the weak ones" first and then going after the strong has been
listed by them as their strategy), that "amongst our weaponry are such diverse
elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to our
interpretation of guidelines", but that has been the effect.
An anecdote: recently on the current TTN Arbcom case, one editor was adumbrating what he
believed were examples of the kind of articles Wikipedia doesn't and shouldn't
have. One example was Bill Clinton's dog.
As it happens, I knew perfectly well that we had an article on [[Buddy (dog)]], and
[[Socks (cat)]] too. But I had to pause for a time: by mentioning those two articles as
counterexamples on a page TTN and his supporters frequented, was I marking these articles
for death as surely as if I had started the AfD myself?
After a couple of minutes of thought, I decided that even if Buddy got deleted (Socks is
referenced out the wazoo and so in no danger, I thought), he was a popular enough
presidential pet that his article would get recreated at some point. But it did take some
thought, and I'm actually unsure that mentioning the two pets here is not even more
dangerous for the articles.
--
gwern
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