"Matthew Brown" wrote
The postings are also interesting from the point-of-view of finding what turns off qualified people from contributing Wikipedia.
Well, lack of time, obviously ...
Unsurprisingly, both blogs mention that the whole 'notability' mess is a big barrier, and a big part of our systemic bias.
Our concept of notability is anyway not transparent. It would not be an improvement, necessarily, to have a clearer criterion with a worse outcome. If you target the systemic bias thing, it is fairly clearly the case of not enough 'minority interest' articles created, rather than too many deleted, though.
Academics are going to focus on the borderline cases: the way their minds work. We have least to say about those, really.
Charles
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On 12/6/06, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
If you target the systemic bias thing, it is fairly clearly the case of not enough 'minority interest' articles created, rather than too many deleted, though.
I do think there is significant systemic bias in terms of what things tend to be nominated for deletion, however. Not the biggest source of systemic bias by any means, as you point out.
-Matt
On 06/12/06, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
I do think there is significant systemic bias in terms of what things tend to be nominated for deletion, however. Not the biggest source of systemic bias by any means, as you point out.
I suspect it's often systematic bias, i.e. a deep conviction that certain areas of coverage should be killed and anyone disagreeing must be clueless or a troll.
- d.
On 12/6/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I suspect it's often systematic bias, i.e. a deep conviction that certain areas of coverage should be killed and anyone disagreeing must be clueless or a troll.
Well, there's that, but there's also the 'I've never heard of it, thus delete' category. Thus, topics not known by your typical Wikipedian are more likely to be nominated for deletion. Most of these will be saved, but the aggravation of deletion debates is an offputting factor.
-Matt
On 06/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 06/12/06, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
I do think there is significant systemic bias in terms of what things tend to be nominated for deletion, however. Not the biggest source of systemic bias by any means, as you point out.
I suspect it's often systematic bias, i.e. a deep conviction that certain areas of coverage should be killed and anyone disagreeing must be clueless or a troll.
*However*, it's worth noting that whilst this is a form of systemic bias, it's not usually related to the major fields where we actually worry about our systemic bias.
(By which I mean: we worry about systemic bias over non-western regions and cultures, over gender issues, etc... but our "deletion systemic bias" is about schools and Western pop-culture cruft)