[WikiEN-l] Google Knol: Move over Wikipedia?

[gwern0 at gmail.com]

On 2007.12.20 04:04:24 -0700, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at 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
X400 NAVCM F-22 SERT rain RIT Gulf BLACKER clones cryptanalysis
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