Comments on: Five Years of Great Failure

By: Gordon Haff

Gordon Haff — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 19:28:47 +0000

I understand that there has to be some pushback at Wikipedia against endless proliferation of articles, especially if the article in question is either someone’s vanity piece or it’s only a few sentences of information that could readily be folded into a broader topic.

That said…

In general, I really have a lot of trouble with the deletionist side in general. This, after all, is an encyclopedia that has long entries on individual TV episodes in shows that are obscure to all but some small group of Wikipedians. Ditto for comics, toys, etc. etc. All of which makes it very difficult for me to see how consistency allows the deletion of just about any article that meets a bare minimum standard of notability–even on a local basis–and quality.

By: Stephen Jones

Stephen Jones — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 02:52:44 +0000

Have a great New Years. And be careful if you must drive. A cop may pull you over and have to issue you a [citation needed].

By: damaged justice

damaged justice — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:29:40 +0000

Wikipedia is a fantastic resource for facts that aren’t in dispute, like whether P=NP, or whether Han shot first.

By: DeepGeek

DeepGeek — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:55:17 +0000

Hrm,
I was going to chime in with a “Stankdawg and Binrev had an archive for dying wikipedia pages, but I don’t know it’s current status.” But it looks like there are several projects like this.

I am not a great web programmer, but I do wonder, what would it take to write a system that would just take entries and make a one-time offline copy of them. What programming effort is involved?

I currently backup my system with a combination or rsync and nilfs2, which gives me a monthly snapshot of my own system (and my offline copies of my websites, but not my virtual machine images.) What would it took to take the “feeds” feature of wikipedia, and generate something like this? Would it be like, impossible? Have there been attempts?
—
DeepGeek

By: Swizzle

Swizzle — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:49:14 +0000

I love the general idea of Wikipedia, but it’s clearly not working as it is now. They seem to be destroying more than they are preserving since few people look for something beyond what is on Wikipedia.

I don’t understand why perfectly good articles are deleted under the idea that they are not “notable.” Different articles will generate different amounts of traffic… there is nothing wrong with having articles on niche topics which generate a small amount of traffic.

I would love to find a site where good material will stay. I do a lot of my own research on topics which interest me (80/90′s gaming, computer history) and unfortunately spend more time trying to figure out how to get that information/data easily available to the public than doing the actual research.