Kirill Lokshin wrote:

The solution is pretty obvious, then: redirect (possibly after merging any useful information) the crap articles with abandon. I'm surprised, for instance, that we don't simply redirect each vanity band entry to [[Garage band]]; most of the authors won't be back to check, I suspect.

Shhh! Don't mention that on a public mailing list!!

:-)

But seriously, for the 3/4 of articles not watched by anybody, you've pretty much got a free hand. Prune the unverifiable ramblings out, you'll likely only end up with two lines of factual material; add to [[Garage bands in Iowa]] or whatever, and you're done.

I used to do this kind of thing quite a lot back when I reviewed new articles; often felt like a race to handle them usefully before AfD got to them and made a simple task into a fight. Nearly all of them are still redirects, a year or more later.

Stan

On 1/30/06, Chris Jenkinson chris@starglade.org wrote:

I don't agree with the first premise. Why is it better to delete "crap" articles than improve/rewrite them?

That's sort of like saying, why do we have to choose between tax cuts and more spending on health? Why don't we cut taxes *and* spend more on health?

Oh wait..

Anyway, the vastness of crap on Wikipedia and the high proportion of stubs indicate that the wikipedia workforce is unable/unwilling to keep up with this amount of work. So, given that our poor dog is suffering a terminal illness in great pain, do we put him down or simply pray for him to get better?

Steve

On 1/30/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:

On 1/30/06, Chris Jenkinson chris@starglade.org wrote:

...

I don't agree with the first premise. Why is it better to delete "crap" articles than improve/rewrite them?

That's sort of like saying, why do we have to choose between tax cuts and more spending on health? Why don't we cut taxes *and* spend more on health?

Oh wait..

Anyway, the vastness of crap on Wikipedia and the high proportion of stubs indicate that the wikipedia workforce is unable/unwilling to keep up with this amount of work. So, given that our poor dog is suffering a terminal illness in great pain, do we put him down or simply pray for him to get better?

Steve

Steve hits a core point here. A lot of people prefer to create new articles instead of improving existing ones. Not bad in itself, but at some point we have improve the stuff we've already got rather than adding to our collection. Only so can we improve the quality of our articles.

Support FAC and projects that look for sources. Deletion is only an option for stuff that clearly cannot be redeemed.

Mgm

Relax, little Svenne. The winter is at its end.

--- BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com wrote:

On 1/30/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:

...

Anyway, the vastness of crap on Wikipedia and the

high proportion of

...

stubs indicate that the wikipedia workforce is

unable/unwilling to

...

keep up with this amount of work. So, given that

our poor dog is

...

suffering a terminal illness in great pain, do we

put him down or

...

simply pray for him to get better?

WE??

Who the hell are WE?

YOU are free to stop bothering WIkipedia's collaborative work if you think it amounts to a poor dog suffering a terminal illness in great pain. ME are free to continue adding my improvements to the greatest knowledge base in history if only you would stop trying to kill the dog.

Sorry to say this to you, but since Wikipedia is not a dying dog, it doesn't need any euthanasians. Therefore your services aren't needed. In fact, the world-wide demand for euthanasians is very low right now. Join the army or something, I heard they are helpful to poor dogs suffering terminal illnesses.

-- mvh Björn _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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On 1/31/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:

On 1/30/06, BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com wrote:

...

YOU are free to stop bothering WIkipedia's collaborative work if you think it amounts to a poor dog suffering a terminal illness in great pain. ME are free to continue adding my improvements to the greatest knowledge base in history if only you would stop trying to kill the dog.

Sorry to say this to you, but since Wikipedia is not a dying dog, it doesn't need any euthanasians.

Aputation on the other hand... It is just that the gangrene is starting to smell.

Dear god, if you don't stop with the bad allegories, I'm going to kill something (and I mean it literally, I'll go to a pet store, buy a cat and drown it when I get home if I hear one more of these!)

Cheers!

--Oskar

On 1/31/06, BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com wrote:

YOU are free to stop bothering WIkipedia's collaborative work if you think it amounts to a poor dog suffering a terminal illness in great pain. ME are free to continue adding my improvements to the greatest knowledge base in history if only you would stop trying to kill the dog.

Ouch, I expressed myself really badly. My analogy was meant for an invidual bad article - do we hang onto it hoping that it will get better (knowing that there is a shortage of willing manpower to do this sort of thing), or do we just kill/bury/hide the article?

Wikipedia is great - it just has a rather long "tail" (appropriate for the analogy...) of bad/short articles. Working out what to do with them all is the problem...

Steve

On 1/30/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:

Anyway, the vastness of crap on Wikipedia

In order to test the truth of the above assertion, I pressed "random article" ten times and wrote about what I saw.

The results were as I expected. Out of ten articles, not one that I would be completely happy about deleting. They could all use improvement, some more than others. I contend that the phrase "the vastness of crap on Wikipedia" is extremely misleading. We have a quality product and the world is beating a path to our door to sample it. Enough breastbeating! We should be proud.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTrain_JFK

Rather nice article about a rapid transit system in Queens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claycomo%2C_Missouri

Article about a small village in Missouri. Extensive use of census information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Skorton

Biography of the President of the University of Iowa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatayu

Disambiguation page. Leads to two good short articles and one single-sentence stub. I added an appropriate stub template to the stub.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/544

A historical link page about the year 544 AD. Sadly it is lacking in any information about what was happening outside Europe and the Northern Mediterranean area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis_Pattern

A well written and compendiuous article about a feature of the Japanese cartoon series: Transformers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narail_District

A stub about a district of Bangladesh

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Clemens

A brief biographical article about a professional basketball player who retired in 1976.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Naples

It does what it says on the tin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksmusik

An article about a German folk music form.

Maybe its not a deletion issue at all. Maybe its an inclusion issue for the exported content:

Use the Special:CategoryExport function to compile downloads of compartmentalized blocks of Wikipedia content (en-wikipedia-science, en-wikipedia-science-astronomy, etc. )

What about QA and vandalized versions? Use the Special:Verify and Special:PageRank functions to allow only checked off versions in the downloads.

S

Steve Bennett wrote:

...

[originally sent yesterday but didn't seem to get

through the

...

moderator, perhaps due to my mail server?]

Hi all, This is the deletion paradox as I see it:

1. Wikipedia has nearly a million articles. A very

large number of

...

them are crap. The more articles we delete, the

better.

...

2. Deleting articles causes unhappiness and

tension. The more articles

...

we delete, the more unhappiness and tension.

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On 1/31/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

There's no reason to *delete* a 2-sentence unverified stub, merely to make clear to our readers that it is in fact a 2-sentence unverified stub, and so ought to be read accordingly. Of course, an intelligent reader already ought to be able to recognize that for themselves, but we can help the rest along.

-Mark

The whole point being that if it remains unverifiable for other editors that particular stub will never be expanded, which basically robs the stub of its only function.

Mgm

Delirium wrote:

There's no reason to *delete* a 2-sentence unverified stub, merely to make clear to our readers that it is in fact a 2-sentence unverified stub, and so ought to be read accordingly. Of course, an intelligent reader already ought to be able to recognize that for themselves, but we can help the rest along.

In many many cases there is a reason to delete a 2-sentence unverified stub. We need to be extremely aggressive about doing so when the article in question contains negative claims about any living person or existing company. Such articles may be examples of people using our site to attempt to libel others or they may just be hurtful to someone who is non-notable for no good purpose.

I am always dismayed when I see a good editor wikifying and tagging an absolute crap article, rather than blanking/radically stubbing it (at a minimum) or deleting it (often would be better).

--Jimbo

Steve Bennett wrote:

...

I am always dismayed when I see a good editor wikifying and tagging an absolute crap article, rather than blanking/radically stubbing it (at a minimum) or deleting it (often would be better).

It can be really hard to tell the difference when you're not familiar with the subject matter.

It can be, yes. But as in the Siegenthaler incident, there are cases where there is an unsourced negative claim that anyone could easily spot and remove. You don't need to be an expert in anything to know that claiming someone was briefly suspected of an involvement in the Kennedy assassinations requires a source and should be instantly removed if there is no source.

Another reason why chants of "don't just report the bad articles, fix them!" aren't helpful - if you assume that whatever is in the article is mostly correct but just needs reformatting, you end up making matters worse.

Totally! What you do in such a case is give the article an aura of having been checked or written by real Wikipedians, when it's still the same crap some anon stuck in there in the first place.

In my recent sample, I changed an "External Links" section to "Sources". Then something bothered me, I ended up checking out the links, and realised that the whole article was a puff piece for a probably non-notable Indian journalist. But I really have no expertise in determining whether someone is notable, or whether writing for the Times in India is significant or not. So I tagged the thing {{POV-check}} and left it.

I wouldn't have felt comfortable blanking/deleting the article. Assuming that the guy *was* notable, all it really needed was a slight de-POV tweak and some misleading statements removed.

Right, but this wasn't a "potentially libelous" or negative article, I assume? If it says "Such and such is a journalist in India, he worked here, he worked there" then fine, tag it {{POV-check}} and ask for sources. If it says "Such and such is a NeoNazi activist..." or "Such-and-such was convicted of rape..." then if there is no source, blank it!

--Jimbo

Tony Sidaway wrote:

On 1/31/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

...

In many many cases there is a reason to delete a 2-sentence unverified stub. We need to be extremely aggressive about doing so when the article in question contains negative claims about any living person or existing company.

Actually that has long been one of our criteria for speedy deletion, and I believe that it has always been implemented aggressively.

I'll present some counter-examples in a day or two (have to ask other people to help me remember them), and we can analyze what went wrong.

--Jimbo

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Delirium wrote:

...

There's no reason to *delete* a 2-sentence unverified stub, merely to make clear to our readers that it is in fact a 2-sentence unverified stub, and so ought to be read accordingly. Of course, an intelligent reader already ought to be able to recognize that for themselves, but we can help the rest along.

In many many cases there is a reason to delete a 2-sentence unverified stub. We need to be extremely aggressive about doing so when the article in question contains negative claims about any living person or existing company. Such articles may be examples of people using our site to attempt to libel others or they may just be hurtful to someone who is non-notable for no good purpose.

I am always dismayed when I see a good editor wikifying and tagging an absolute crap article, rather than blanking/radically stubbing it (at a minimum) or deleting it (often would be better).

That's not "in many cases"; that's "in almost no cases". Take a look through our multiple hundreds of thousands of stubs; almost none of them are negative claims. The vast majority are simple matter-of-fact but unsourced things, like "[x] is a commune in the French departement [y]".

I would accept a policy of "delete unverified claims that seem like they might be non-neutral, non-factual, or at least controversial", but that's quite different from "delete all unreferenced stubs".

-Mark