On 08/03/2008, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 6:35 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that will get reflected in how people treat us.
Firstly, we honestly should not give a damn whether our Google rankings are high or low.
Um. I think we want people to read the wikipedia though. Why would people bother contributing if nobody reads it? Do our audience want us to be high in google rankings? I would think so. A *lot* of people find wikipedia articles that way. You more or less seem to be saying you don't care about what our audience wants. Well, it's an argument.
We're not in the business of producing Google rankings, and we don't get ad revenues from the hits.
There's subtle problems with abandoning notabilty, like every corner store in the entire damn world would want and would be able to get a wikipage. And that would push them way, way up in the google rankings.
That's one of the important functions that notability deals with, without it, every single tiny company in the whole world will have an article for business reasons, and you know that many of them will be forced for business reasons to anonymously sabotaging each other. Could that ever be a good thing? How could we deal with that kind and scale of in-article advertising? And once they're all in the database it would be horrible to try to delete them; millions of companies, you would have to go through one by one by one...
Secondly, our Google rankings and our rankings on peoples' personal indicators of reliability are to do with the fact that we are likely to have pretty good content on a topic searched for, compared to what else is available online in one place.
No, that's not really true, because the wikipedia implicitly (not deliberately) uses SEO techniques; google juice enters and never leaves. Basically almost any article in the wikipedia ranks higher than almost the rest of the web for that reason.
So ANY junky article in the wikipedia, is BIG in web terms. Do we have a responsibility to the rest of the web? Not per se. But the rest of the web decides how big we are and they can diminish us; that could well mean that our current best articles become a lot less significant. But apparently you say above we shouldn't care about google. Uh huh.
If a person searches for something, the existence or non-existence of articles unrelated to their interests doesn't alter the quality of the information they find on what they ARE searching for. It's simply invisible.
Not if the wikipedia has an article on almost every word in the English language, which it soon will have, and has effectively SEO'd a bunch of non notable articles on any particular topic up above the rest of the web. I say that it's really not a good idea at all for the wikipedia to do that; they trust us, and we must not abuse that trust.
However, if someone searches for something and we DON'T cover it - because some ad hoc 'consensus' of half-a-dozen AFD regulars decided it was 'non-notable' - then Wikipedia has failed to provide information.
It doesn't sound to me like they're following policy if it's ad hoc consensus.
That tends to leave people with a bad taste in their mouths; double that if when they searched last week, Wikipedia DID have the information they wanted and now doesn't.
There are worse things.
'Non-notable' content only 'hurts' our quality if you are measuring quality by some pretty odd measures.
Particularly if you call 'odd' any meaasures that delete items deemed 'non-notable' you are personally fond of i expect.
Yes, it's embarassing when some blogger points out that we cover some random Pokemon better than we cover a head of state. The solution to that isn't to delete the Pokemon.
You'll need to point me to where the policy says that that's the process.
But there's the opposite problem as well; deleting notability because somebody used it to delete Pokemon is *serious* overcorrection. The right answer is to work out a criteria that allows Pokemon (if we decide that Pokemon is desirable) and add it to the policy. NOT delete the policy. Big changes to solve small problems are rarely a good idea. You're suggesting removing a core policy that would create millions of articles including small business and people's cats.
Yes, there's always going to be losers with any thing that helps maintain quality. Most of the measures we have are only correlated with quality, not direct measures. That means that some things get excluded when they shouldn't. But my point is that this is probably unavoidable if we want a high quality encyclopedia, which to be brutally honest, it doesn't sound like you do, particularly- you value covering 'everything' higher.
It might be better if you didn't assume that because people disagree with you they don't value the encyclopedia.
No, I said that they valued covering everything HIGHER than they valued quality, and I stand by that assessment.
I also see no reason why we have to use any automated measure of quality that creates 'losers'.
Then you just haven't thought it through fully; which is not surprising, removing notability would be significant and complicated enough, that I'm not sure anybody CAN think it through fully. And if that doesn't scare you then it really, really, really should.
-Matt