8 ms·

A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

148 points by b5 4y ago

powera 4y ago
It wouldn't be entirely unfair to say that Wikipedia's policies are designed to keep people like Mr. Gioia off the site and out of the decision making process. Considering that he doesn't want to learn what Wikipedia's policies are, or why they exist (and his calling people who disagree with him "trolls"), I am inclined to think that is a good thing.
- leereeves 4y ago
  > It wouldn't be entirely unfair to say that Wikipedia's policies are designed to keep people like Mr. Gioia off the site and out of the decision making process. Why? Who is he and what has he done that might make Wikipedia dislike him?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - pklausler 4y ago
    Ted Gioia is a prolific author on jazz musicology and history; I have several of his books and find them to be informative and entertaining.
- chipotle_coyote 4y ago
  Getting huffy about Mr. Gioia's choice of language doesn't really engage with the substance of his complaint. Is there a stated Wikipedia policy that composers must have an entry in the Grove Dictionary of Music to be considered notable? I bet there isn't. If Gioia is correct in saying that Wikipedia editors are insisting on that, then those Wikipedia editors are applying an arbitrary standard. They are, in a word, trolling. And I am inclined to think calling them out is a good thing.
  - powera 4y ago
    He's not correct. One editor of six in the deletion discussion mentioned that they had checked multiple sources (including Grove) and Faulconer wasn't in them.
- atoav 4y ago
  Sorry, but I think that composer is relevant. So this is not about knowing policy, it is about disagreement.
  - powera 4y ago
    One of the reasons for the policies is so questions such as "should this person have an article" don't devolve into popularity polls.
    - _aavaa_ 4y ago
      I'm sorry, but "is this musician notable" literally is a popularity contest.
      - cinntaile 4y ago
        I was about to post this.
      - powera 4y ago
        Two different objections. First, while the most written-about musicians are also generally the most popular, there isn't a strict correlation. Second, there is a vast difference between a decision-process of "if the sources provided show that this person is popular, they are notable" and "if three of the four Wikipedia editors surveyed like this person's music, they are notable".
        _aavaa_ 4y ago
        1. You are both correct and incorrect. The most well written about musicians are the most popular by definition within the group of people who write about musicians. A) This does not mean that those musicians are popular within some sizeable portion of the general population. B) The preferences of the people writing about musicians (that wikipedia will accept as a source) are not guaranteed to be representative of the population at large, in fact I'd wager that essentially guaranteed to be not true at different points in time and for different genres. Wikipedia is choosing to conflate the popularity of an artist amongst the writing group and the popularity in the broader public. And when the two groups disagree, they are choosing to go with those who write rather than with the broader public. 2. This isn't about "the sources provided shot that he's popular", it's do we acknowledge that their contribution is defined as popular. Dragon Ball Z is/was an incredibly popular and influential anime. I guess all it takes now is for someone at WIRED who loved Dragon Ball Z to publish an article or two about them and they suddenly become notable.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  Wow. I thought Wikipedia was supposed to be a public resource. I wasn't aware certain people were supposed to stay off the site.
  - dwringer 4y ago
    I once tried to edit an article about a scientist who had developed a bit of surrounding controversy over his studies in parapsychology. Having no real knowledge of the debate, I didn't add or remove any information; I just felt the introduction had been written in an overtly non-neutral way by a past editor. So, I removed a couple of words like "hoax" and trimmed one or two sentences so that they didn't come off as a character assassination (they had contained unsourced editorializations). Specifics aside, the article had explicitly violated Wikipedia's policies on using NPOV language. My edits were reverted within 24 hours, and the talk page was updated with an admonition to my IP address (I'd posted without logging in) claiming I'd been implicated in "unsavory" activities that could be found by Googling the IP (it was a dynamic IP, but of course I tried and found nothing) and making vague threats that I should not attempt such edits again. That's the last time I edited anything on Wikipedia.
    - jtbayly 4y ago
      That's editing. I mean, I can understand that certain people might not be great at editing. But I'm shocked that they would say there are people they don't even want on the site.
      - dwringer 4y ago
        I can't tell if you're suggesting that my edits were simply bad, and typically I would accept that is a possibility; but, even then, it was the fact that I was threatened essentially with being swatted. There was no feedback on the edits that I made. Just unfounded assertions that my IP address was involved in something "unsavory" and that I would face severe consequences if I continued such edits. It made me feel very unwelcome and I assume many other people have the same experience on Wikipedia. I realize the futility of trying to convince you that my edits were warranted, I guess. The article has since been updated, however, and the non-neutral tone that I'd tried to fix has been removed, so apparently somebody else ultimately did succeed.
- tgv 4y ago
  If the policy is “you must feature in Grove’s”, Wikipedia becomes even more derivative than it already is.
  - erik_seaberg 4y ago
    As it was always intended be. Secondary sources only, no original research.
- fcatalan 4y ago
  It would be about 99% unfair. In my experience Wikipedia style moderation setups are a magnet for small minded petty martinets. Of course rules and some criteria are needed, but soon those people run over any shred of common sense while wielding them.
worik 4y ago
Pedantically: "In another bizarre case, an editor at Wikipedia told Philip Roth, “one of the most awarded American authors of his generation” (according to Wikipedia) that he was not a reliable source on the subject of Philip Roth." Philip Roth is not an authoritative source on Philip Roth. I would have thought that was obvious.
- googlryas 4y ago
  Philip Roth was the authoritative source on Philip Roth. In fact, he wrote a whole book about him called The Facts.
- leijurv 4y ago
  Some mistake or miscommunication happened there, as Wikipedia does have a policy that people can be cited for information about themselves, the policy is called SELFSOURCE. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SELFSOURCE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SELFSOURCE Perhaps the issue was that Philip Roth was unable to sufficiently demonstrate his identity? Of course, Wikipedia can't take a random editor's word when they say "I am this person and this is the truth", then anyone could say anything. There has to be some citation, for example I've seen someone cite a tweet for simple biographical information (e.g. "today is my birthday").
- defen 4y ago
  How does laundering the info through The New Yorker make it authoritative? Any putative fact checking for the article itself would necessarily entail asking him "Hey Phil, that article you just wrote for us about the inspiration for your best-selling, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel - was that true or were you just having a giggle?"
goldenchrome 4y ago
egberts1 4y ago
I was making a Wikipedia page back in 2004 about Deaf Cultures and Deaf Educators. Both were summarily deleted. So I started it again but under my User directory. That too got deleted. So, Wikipedia editors are inherently anti-diversity.
- notafraudster 4y ago
  This sounds like a bad experience. I find Wikipedia pretty daunting and I'm not surprised you got tripped up trying to edit. But as a lay person reading your post, I do not know what "Deaf Cultures and Deaf Educators" is. Is this a book? I tried googling for it but didn't find it. Wikipedia does have an article on Deaf culture (lowercase c): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture -- it was created in March of 2004. I am not sure about "Deaf educators", but Wikipedia does have an article on Deaf education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_education and on Dead studies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_studies and on Schools for the deaf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_for_the_deaf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_for_the_deaf (this one is in notable need of expansion). It looks like the separate article for Deaf education sprung into being in the early 2010s and previously redirect-merged to deaf culture. I think it's at least possible here that you were not discriminated against as part of an anti-diversity agenda, but rather that you misunderstood some of Wikipedia's needlessly complicated rules or maybe didn't present what you were trying to add in the right way. I went back through the articles for deletion discussion for all of 2004 and could not find a discussion about deleting an article by the name you said. I went through the full list of deleted articles in 2001-2004 -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_log https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_log -- and searched for "deaf" and didn't find anything relevant ever. If your pages were deleted after 2004, they're only visible in the modern deletion log and that requires an exact title match unless you're an administrator, which I am not. So unfortunately I think without more information it's going to be hard to help you 18 years later. But I'm pretty sure it was not because Wikipedia editors were anti-diversity.
  - egberts1 4y ago
stevenjgarner 4y ago
There is a redirecting Wikipedia page for Bruce Faulconer [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Ball_Z https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Ball_Z
- jtbayly 4y ago
  And there is a link from the Dragon Ball Z page where its music is discussed to the Bruce Faulconer page (which existed for 15 years, but no longer does), but that page then redirects back to the Dragon Ball Z page. Seems pretty dumb.
guender 4y ago
oezi 4y ago
Now that Google is down-ranking Wikipedia anyway couldn't Wikipedia relax their notability requirements? I understood why they didn't want anybody to create a marketing page for themselves ten years ago, but I don't understand the rational now. The long term goal for Wikipedia should be to collect information on anything that is of interest to one or more person.
- peterlk 4y ago
  Wikipedia actually seems like a good replacement for personal "websites" in the social media era. I'd love to see the wikimedia social network
  - standardUser 4y ago
    Do you mean this? https://wt.social/ https://wt.social/ I joined long ago but have never used it.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  > The long term goal for Wikipedia should be to collect information on anything that is of interest to one or more person. That is very explicitly not a goal of Wikipedia. Of course you're free to disagree with what Wikipedia ought to be, but they're at least fairly clear and explicit about their own goals.
- echelon 4y ago
  > Now that Google is down-ranking Wikipedia anyway Can you expand on this? I wasn't aware Google penalized Wikipedia now. Why?
  - Viliam1234 4y ago
    Just a guess, but probably because Wikipedia does not contain AdSense, so there is no money in putting it to the search results. No one would officially admit this, of course, but whenever I see that Google prioritizes X over Y, X is usually a type of thing more likely to contain AdSense than Y.
BrainVirus 4y ago
Wikipedia is a cautionary tale of what will inevitably happen if you try to hypercentralize information at the Internet scale. It's broken on every conceivable level, and yet people stubbornly cling to the myth that was formed around it circa 2005. Instead of being surprised at things over and over again, I think it's time to adjust our collective expectations to match the reality.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  All models are broken, some are useful... Wikipedia works really, really well at specific points of leverage. It can change over time but the most likely-successful change will still center on building from leverage points outward.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > Wikipedia is a cautionary tale of what will inevitably happen if you try to hypercentralize information at the Internet scale. "Decentralized" <> "unmoderated", "without content standards", or "without editors". Is there a more decentralized knowledge resource of general significance? Hosting happens to be centralized, only because nobody else cares enough to rehost it themselves (which the license allows you to do).
- mhh__ 4y ago
  > It's broken on every conceivable level And yet it's still really good. People like Larry Sanger prattle on about how awful wikipedia is (and make multiple websites for collecting mistakes, which mostly seem to be blank), rarely with any concrete evidence. In fact Sanger in particular refuses to browse wikipedia at all - except that he does but through a proxy, because giving wikipedia.org traffic is "icky". I pointed out that this is childish behaviour and he blocked me, go figure.
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    As many problems as Wikipedia has, and it surely has them, it's amazing how useful it remains despite those problems, and it's the only thing we have like it. Stack Overflow is similar: you can make it look pretty bad case by case, yet it's an unchallenged best of breed despite its warts. Maybe there's no perfect way to run these massive operations just like there is no clean, pretty answer to "should this article exist?" no matter where you set the bar.
stevenjgarner 4y ago
Wikipedia includes entries based on notability, but they have their own idea on notability. A friend of mine is a famous voice actor who has won not one but two CLIO awards. Wikipedia deleted the page I created for him on the basis that he was not notable. Another page I created was for the person who introduced deaf sign language to New Zealand. Deleted as she was not notable. There are more than 19,000 entries for CLIO awards [0] from 62 countries yet only 18 Clio Awards juries comprised of industry leaders from across the globe awarded 13 Grand Clios in 2020/2021 [1]. The Global Advertising Agencies Market Size in 2022 was worth approx. $332.1 billion [2]. By comparison the Academy Awards give out Oscars in 24 categories [3] to nominees selected from only 9,921 members [4]. The Motion Picture Association released a new report on the international box office and home entertainment market showing that the industry reached $101 billion USD in 2019 [5]. Oscars are considered notable. CLIOs are not. It would appear that making art is notable (except in the sad case of Bruce Faulconer), while impacting an entire industry or contributing to marketing or education in a highly visibly recognized manner is not. [0] https://clios.com/ https://clios.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clio_Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clio_Awards [2] https://www.ibisworld.com/global/market-size/global-advertising-agencies/ https://www.ibisworld.com/global/market-size/global-advertis... [3] https://www.britannica.com/art/Academy-Award https://www.britannica.com/art/Academy-Award [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_Motion_Picture_Arts_and_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_Motion_Picture_Arts... [5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosaescandon/2020/03/12/the-film-industry-made-a-record-breaking-100-billion-last-year/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosaescandon/2020/03/12/the-fil...
- kupopuffs 4y ago
  Sounds like The Clio Awards need to get the word out
  - stevenjgarner 4y ago
    Talk to anybody in advertising, marketing, radio and television ... believe me they know what a CLIO is (and get paid accordingly). There are so many industry specialties now, that to be a dominant player in one may render you virtually unknown in all others.
glasshug 4y ago
Please read the discussion that deleted this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bruce_Faulconer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... It's a hard problem. Volunteer editors are spread thinly over millions of articles, some of which (like "Bruce Faulconer") are about living people that are really important to get right.[1] The project has settled on the guideline of _notability_, meaning that articles are kept only if they have significant coverage in reliable sources.[2] Proving a negative is not really possible, but it works okay most of the time. It's worth thinking about alternate policies you could set up.[3] You could decide deletion based on whether a figure were "known and beloved all over the world," as the author suggests, which is difficult to define. You could could keep everything,[4] which some alternate Wikis have tried. You get unmaintained pages and probably libel. Gioia criticizes the barrier to contribution, which is also a difficult balance to reach. Some processes are just inherently complex and involve reaching consensus among hundreds of people. Others could be simplified, but every hour spent discussing and implementing improvements is an hour taken from improving the content. The policies are under constant discussion and change,[5] and no one thinks we've reached the perfect balance between these constraints. See, for example, this month's headline case at the Arbitration Committee around deletion.[6] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i... [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Conduct_in_deletion-related_editing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  It seems to me that erroring on the side of not deleting is probably a better policy.
  - ranger207 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
unixbane 4y ago
> A few days ago, composer Bruce Faulconer found that his Wikipedia entry had suddenly disappeared. This was surprising because his music is known and beloved all over the world—in fact, it has been heard in more than 80 countries. Hmmm how do I already know from the first paragraph this article is bogus? Let me search this person I've never heard of. Oh, there's nothing. He's literally not noteable. "Heard in more than 80 countries" is something small independent internet artists did 20 years ago, and they didn't get wikipedia pages either.
- causi 4y ago
  Dude he's the guy that did the music for Dragonball, a thirty billion dollar franchise. I'm shocked he was removed from Wikipedia.
  - mynameishere 4y ago
    While I've never heard of Dragonball--and I'm sure it's really great--I'll make a wild guess that 100s or 1000s of people worked on it in one capacity or another and that doesn't really make them "Notable".
    - meowface 4y ago
      It's probably the #1 most well-known anime in the US.
      - mynameishere 4y ago
        That sounds great. I was actually thinking "video game" but didn't bother looking it up because it's not really that important, is it after all? But I can think of some other musicians who've worked on cartoons--David Bowie, Roger Waters, Primus, uh, Art Garfunkel. One thing they have in common is their notability didn't really come from that type of work. Straining a bit through the mists of time, I suppose Frank Churchill is genuinely notable for his cartoon work. Matt and Trey, of course, but they are writing show tunes for fun, it seems. I mean, it's incidental music, right? Hollywood has lots of people who do that. No one cares about them either.
armchairhacker 4y ago
Honestly even if he isn’t famous why can’t Wikipedia keep his entry? Why does Wikipedia even have “notable” requirements anyways? There’s not a storage issue. Wikipedia can literally have billions of articles and still be easy to maintain. There’s not really a quality issue. Wikipedia is known for not being 100% reliable. But moreover, they have tons of ways to denote “this article needs citations” and “this isn’t a reliable source”. If Wikipedia is concerned about quality, they can have “verified” and “contributed” articles, just like how distros have “stable” and “user-contributed / experimental”. Spammers and useless content? This is an issue. But this guy is clearly not spam, the proof being any of his official works. I do agree that Wikipedia authors should remove “spammy” entries and entries on complete nobodies and random things, but you shouldn’t need to be in an Oxford journal to not be considered a “nobody”. Even things which are famous in small towns and 1000-member groups should be on Wikipedia IMO, because most of the stuff is already on there is about as relevant to me or anyone else (which is to say, pretty irrelevant). If you want relevant content, that’s what the search tools and indexing are for. Wikipedia is supposed to be “the grand encyclopedia” where you can find info on basically anything. There are already tons of Wikipedia articles on obscure people, places, and things. Way more obscure than this composer even if he isn’t truly well-known. Why does “relevance” even matter?
- bazoom42 4y ago
  Anybody can already create their own web page or wiki following their own policies. The reason people want their content on Wikipedia is because a Wikipedia page signal a certain notability compared to a random web page. So the inclusionists want to eat the cake and keep it too.
- derefr 4y ago
  > Why does Wikipedia even have “notable” requirements anyways? Think of it like code in an active open-source project. Someone needs to maintain the article: update it when house style changes, evaluate any new contributions to it as being valid or not, etc. Like code experiencing code-rot, a Wikipedia article rots if editors don't give it active attention. This has exactly the implications you'd expect: it means that articles about things that don't change, are easier to keep around than are articles about things that might change; which are in turn easier to keep around than are articles about things that definitely will change. Living people — where the article is basically living biography for them — are in that last category. The "notability" requirement can be translated into editor-ese as a combination of 1. "how many people could we find who could contribute to this page", and 2. "how much demand is there for Wikipedia — rather than some other website — to do the work of keeping this." Re: the first point about contribution, this is why Wikipedia doesn't let people be their own primary source — it's because, when that primary-source person eventually stops maintaining the page, who will then be able to take over the maintenance? If that's "nobody", then to prevent that, the page shouldn't be allowed in the first place. Re: the second point about demand — the Pokemon Pikachu has its own Wikipedia page, because people expect Wikipedia specifically to have an article about Pikachu. Other Pokemon do not — because there's already Bulbapedia around to satisfy the demand for an encyclopedia with articles about Pokemon, and the pages from it are easily found in any search engine. If a different set of editors are willing to take on the maintenance burden for those articles in their own domain — and are doing a decent job of it — then why should Wikipedia's editors duplicate that effort?
lucideer 4y ago
Plenty of comments on here suggesting WP relaxing/removing notability requirements: the problem is deeper. WP could retain the exact notability requirements they currently have, as written, and still vastly improve the situation from the current mess. As it stands: - mentions of any thing or person without a pre-existing article (by extension meeting notability requirements) are quickly deleted by fans of the frequently referenced "Write the Article First" essay[0]. While this essay is clearly labelled as an opinion piece, not policy, that opinion is staunchly defended by people with more time on their hands than you do. - Any effort to follow the essay's advice and actually create a new article is quickly curbed: despite the notability requirements policies containing detailed sections on the benefits of "stubs" as prompts to grow useful article content, newly minted articles are summarily deleted if they are not perfect on first draft (and extremely comprehensively referenced). When I first started contributing to Wikipedia almost 2 decades ago, these articles and similar debates between cohorts of "deletionists", etc. certainly existed, but what looks to have happened over the years is that the most progressive of those cohorts left, probably tired of constantly grappling with the hostilities of those with seemingly nothing better to do than to pour all of their hours into making Wikipedia their staunchly defended castle. Becoming a new contributor to Wikipedia today involves a barrier to entry only zealots will bother to spend time overcoming. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Write_the_article_first https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Write_the_article_...
- Victerius 4y ago
  > Becoming a new contributor to Wikipedia today involves a barrier to entry only zealots will bother to spend time overcoming. The current editors and admins will die someday. Who will replace them? If only the worst kind of people bother making the effort to become the next editors and admins, then Wikipedia will decline in quality and eventually die and be replaced by other sources, like fandom.
- bpeebles 4y ago
  I'd say its hard to start as a new Wikipedia editor if you only goal is to make article X or make huge changes to article Y that is somewhat controversial. On the other hand, if you start in Wikipedia by doing simple edits in non-controversial subjects (which does improve Wikipedia, and thus, the Internet given how many search engines just scrape Wikipedia for search results), start making making some new articles in notable things that are also not controversial, then you can start understanding how to get controversial (but correct) things added and changed. Yes, that takes longer and is more work, but at the same time, similar to open source software, you have to spend time learning how to code and how to make valuable and correct PRs to make major overhauls to heavily used software.
thrdbndndn 4y ago
I probably will side with Wikipedia this time. As mentioned in the discussion page [1], there doesn't seem to have any coverage from mass media about him, the only opponent in the discussion lists a bunch of sources/references that are either database-type websites, attendance lists, or product credit. These unfortunately don't really count, any professionals would have such things to a degree. Also it looks like he self-edited the page [2]. This isn't strictly prohibited AFAIK, but it will raise self-promotion [3] red flag and obviously there were hardly any references in his editing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bruce_Faulconer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bruce_Faulconer&diff=1097113662&oldid=1097112408 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bruce_Faulconer&d... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
- barnabee 4y ago
  The idea of an encyclopaedia that only includes topics with significant mass media coverage is both incredibly crass and extremely depressing. If that is the primary standard for inclusion (or “notability”) it is a huge shame and a wasted opportunity.
  - thrdbndndn 4y ago
    > an encyclopaedia that .. Wikipedia has the loosest standard of inclusion among any encyclopedia ever existed, not sure why that's depressing.
    - barnabee 4y ago
      Because it is a much tighter “standard” than it needs to be given the constraints. It is depressing to think of all the effort that people put into writing articles that no one can ever benefit from, knowing there’s no good reason for their work to be wasted in this way.
      - bazoom42 4y ago
kevinpet 4y ago
> Just a few months before Donna Strickland won the Nobel, a Wikipedia editor had smugly insisted that she wasn’t a notable physicist. I heard about this at the time, and it stood out to me as totally missing the point. It's completely 100% possible that winning the Nobel Prize elevated Dr. Strickland from not notable to notable. A physicist who has done work that could win a Nobel Prize is probably getting close to notable but it's hard for an encyclopedia that doesn't engage in original research to adjudicate that. Actually winning is that third party recognition that wikipedia's notability standards are supposed to rely on.
- hyperpape 4y ago
  This isn't the case. I'm familiar with the standards applied for living philosophers, and they fall far short of the level of "future Nobel prize winner" (A quick glance at Wikipedia show I took classes from 7 such individuals while in grad school). Similarly for physicists: there are over 1000 21st century physicists listed on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:21st-century_physicists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:21st-century_physicis....
  - kevinpet 4y ago
    You misrepresent my claim. I said it is natural to assume that someone who has done work that will earn a Nobel prize is at least approaching notability. I did not say that is required for notability. I'm not a wikipedia expert but many of those don't meet their criteria for notability. Taking the first in the Canadian physicists category, I get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Abella https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Abella The only non-primary source that isn't an obituary is Who's Who in Science and Engineering. He objectively doesn't meet the criteria listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academic... I can't find the original pre-deletion article, but the edit comments mention that Strickland was a past president of the Optical Society. The guidelines for notability contemplate this sort of thing when they say "The person has been an elected member of a highly selective and prestigious scholarly society or association (e.g., a National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society)". There are lots of other criteria, but that's one of them, and we can recognize that the Optical Society is not in the same category. You can say wikipedia's notability criteria are inconsistently applied. I'm not surprised. But most of these complaints amount to asking wikipedia to recognize inherent merit, which it doesn't do. Wikipedia correctly recognized Strickland's notability after the Nobel committee recognized her merit and accomplishments. Interestingly, while responding to this I noticed that the article we are discussing here, when talking about Strickland, probably misrepresents things. The edit history on wikipedia shows an article was created and then deleted in 2014, not "just a few months before Donna Strickland won the Nobel". The Washington Post article cited in the previous sentence doesn't support that claim either. So part of what we are discussing here includes supposed facts which might be fully invented or significantly distorted by the reporter.
themodelplumber 4y ago
Not sure if this has changed, but I wish there was a way to kind of dull the downside-edge of this kind of outcome. For example maybe there's another place the person's info can go that's not so obviously a trash can, and ideally even still a useful or interesting place. It ought to be possible, IMO. And I'll add that noteworthiness is a real cringe of a model in a lot of ways. Personally I saw the downsides of this first hand back in the early 2000s, when I created a page for a software developer. It didn't seem right to put their information, much of which was interesting and relevant, but which wasn't related to the software, on the software's page. So anyway, their page was deleted with the note that his info should probably just go on that one app's page. A really shallow/easy suggestion especially given that it had already been considered and didn't make sense in various ways. And then I realized: This whole thing has created extra pain for someone, who for years had a Wikipedia page, and who now has had it deleted. None of which was their choice, but all of which started with intentions to inform and build on a useful corpus of knowledge. So, is that pain-side really, really necessary? I think such a process can be done better.
- ilikehurdles 4y ago
  Wikipedia commingles the “facts” with the organization of those facts. What Wikipedia really is, is that organizational structure. Whether a developer has their own page, or is mentioned on the page of a product they created, is irrelevant in that both views acknowledge the same facts: the developer exists and the product exists and these things are related in that the developer created it. It would be interesting if the database of facts driving Wikipedia were available to all, and Wikipedia is recognized as providing one of potentially many ways to organize/publish that database for human reading. In other words, if I want to add information about a composer and her composition to the database I can do so, and if Wikipedia chooses only to publish the composition but not the composer, that is entirely their decision.
shp0ngle 4y ago
As a wikipedia contributor, I disagree. You don’t automatically deserve Wikipedia article because you exist, or even because you did a good job your whole life. Even if you have tons of credits on IMDV. You don’t “deserve” wikipedia article. It’s not a collection of everything that exists ever. The criteria for notability on wikipedia are actually quite clear and documented. It’s not a badge for a job well done… And if you disagree with that - fine, it’s creative commons, you can easily get all the articles with all their histories (wikipedia helpfully dumps all that periodically every day as giant XML), and the software is open source; you can fork it and create article on every living human being that ever existed.
- onli 4y ago
  Thanks for this comment. It is the essence of why for me the Wikipedia project can't die soon enough. The criteria for notability on wikipedia are not clear and documented. They are a joke, with a camp of zealots deleting everything they can delete - maybe they see it as a hobby, maybe they need it to feel powerful. The criteria do not matter as long as such people are allowed to wield power. And the english Wikipedia is actually the good one in this category, the german is already completely broken because of this clientele. You are right, it could be forked, but in practice it's unlikely humanity has the capacity to run two such projects. Thus Wikipedia - if it does not course correct - will sink slowly into irrelevance, be flanked with better wikis for specific topics (sadly often proprietary platforms/commercial projects) and then, hopefully, what you describe will really happen and a new Wikipedia will be forked, learning from the mistakes that are completely obvious to everyone outside of that current in-group of contributors.
  - shp0ngle 4y ago
    Note, I don’t wield any power on Wikipedia, I am a small time contributor that nominate something for deletion, about 3 times per year. The rules are here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability The humanity actually cannot meaningfully have an article about every person in human history, and have some standard for quality. There do need to be notability guidelines. But. People are complaining about this stuff for decades now, and wikipedia is not going anywhere. So that’s good. I do hate inscrutable wikipedia bureaucracy too though. It’s almost impossible to navigate the maze of projects and rules and committees. But that’s a different issue.
chiph 4y ago
From what I've seen, the key to keeping pages up on Wikipedia is to have a lot of verifiable references & citations. If you do this like you're writing a college paper, rogue editors have much less power. Challenges to their reverts & deletions are also more likely to succeed. A good example of this is the article for the unloved Honda Ridgeline pickup. Jalopnik did an article about how the Wikipedia page for it is astonishingly detailed and (exhaustively) referenced. https://jalopnik.com/the-story-behind-the-honda-ridgelines-wildly-unusually-1821813634 https://jalopnik.com/the-story-behind-the-honda-ridgelines-w...
- lucideer 4y ago
  > rogue editors [...] power The problem is that this takes SO MUCH time and energy. Most give up. Taking time out of your day to voluntarily improve a free resource is already energy intensive without also expending that energy battling with zealots. Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying providing proper references takes too much time, I'm saying that having to fight with people to be permitted to keep content while building references takes much more energy again.
YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
The author is calling everyone who doesn't agree with him about Faulconer's notability a "troll" (and more times than one in the article). >> In the spirit of Wikipedia procedures and reliable source documents, I want to add a few endnotes to this article. >> TROLLS (Par. 3): Here’s my conversation with Faulconer on the use of this word: >> Ted: People may question the suitability of the word trolls here—some of these trolls are Wikipedia editors >> Bruce: When they act in this way, they behave like trolls. So it’s a fair word. >> Ted: Yes, that’s my considered judgment too. That's not a "considered judgement". That's just a flame. Very disappointing.
- hitekker 4y ago
  It’s a fun, relevant metaphor. Some folks live under a bridge and have nothing to do but to harass travelers. Trolls don’t own the bridge and they certainly shouldn’t be demanding tolls and taxes. But their position has stunted their minds and twisted their hearts. They’ve spent too much time wallowing in the unreal realm of the internet; they fear the light of day. If people were to shine a light on them, they’d die of embarrassment.
JanneVee 4y ago
It is things like this that has reduced the usefulness of wikipedia for me personally. I wasn't aware of the whole "notability deletionists" before I tried to look up the Rockstar programming language when discussing esoteric programming languages a while back. I knew that there was a entry there it was a nice short introduction to it but it was deleted by these people. In one way it is piece of "programmer culture" that was removed but at the other hand it is an esoteric programming language so it might not be "notable" almost by definition. This article highlights the slippery slope of it. It is one thing to remove the esoteric language that nobody is seriously using but has a little cultural significance except for a small number of programmer nerds like myself. This composer is actually notable in comparison. Who gets to decide notability? What is next? Are we going to be removing lore from small ethnic groups because there isn't some academic reference to it and someone dutifully transcribed oral tradition and translated a language which only a few speak... No not notable...
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Reminds me of a few months back when I tried to link Amy Winehouse's "Mr. Magic" to the great original Grover Washington piece of the same name. Same name, same music, some Wikipedia support in other places, though not extensive. Both on Youtube, takes seconds to confirm. Some pedanto reverts it every time I tried. Says "it's not in the booklet" (of the CD). Believe the thinking is that reality is not good enough, it must be confirmed by an authority. A disturbing enough idea in itself.
dmitrygr 4y ago
Wikipedia is a joke nowadays. I made a small correction on the ARM Cortex-M page (the listed instructions available in ARMv8-M base were wrong), I cited the relevant ARM document in the change. Nope, got reverted back to the wrong thing... Pretty sure I know this architecture approximately 1000% better than the joker who reverted this, but OK, whatever, let everyone have the wrong info. I gave up.
- picture 4y ago
  I just happened to notice your edit on the Cortex-M page when correcting a typo. As far as I can tell, it doesn't look like your edit was reverted. All of your changes are still present on the current version. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ARM_Cortex-M&type=revision&diff=1101268509&oldid=1088805775&diffmode=source https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ARM_Cortex-M&type...
  - dmitrygr 4y ago
    That was a second attempt a few years later when I decided to try again. First time was while not logged in.
throwawayarnty 4y ago
I found Wikipedia most inconsistent when dealing with academics. Whether living academics are included or not has no relationship with whether they are prominent or influential. That is, May prominent academics do not have wiki pages, and many academics with wiki pages are not prominent. Eg Donna Strickland did not have a wiki page until after it was announced that she won the Nobel prize. People who win Nobel prizes are not overnight successes and were prominent long before getting their prize.
8bitsrule 4y ago
It's clear that B.F. has been connected with Dragon Ball Z - until 2003. The name-link has been redirected to that page. IMDB knows he continued to write music for TV series a couple of times ... up through 2013. So? Lots of people have jobs in the music industry. What makes each of them notable? He has his own website, if anyone has to know more. There are thousands of people sure they oughta have a WP page. I'm glad WP doesn't always agree.
mirages 4y ago
Just adding wikipedia discussion links so people can get a bit of context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bruce_Faulconer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:FaulconerProductionsMusic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:FaulconerProductions...
syrrim 4y ago
Some factor needs to determine what the content of page on wikipedia ends up being. Since "anyone can edit" (credentials are not used as a filter), the content is determined by whoever is most persistent. There are also various processes in place to ensure that content is verifiably correct, and wikipedia largely succeeds in that regard. However, basically everything else, including what information is included, and what spin is put on that information, is decided by the wikipedia editors. They succeed in this regard by being willing to spend the most amount of time camping pages, reverting any change they disagree with, and forming cabals of editors willing to stand up for one another when an editing war emerges. Given wikipedia's funding, it ought to be possible to pay for credentialed experts to curate the editorial bend of articles in their area of expertise. This would have its own issues, namely of causing a bias towards institutionally favoured interpretations, but I think that would be preferable to the status quo.

148 points by b5 4y ago

It wouldn't be entirely unfair to say that Wikipedia's policies are designed to keep people like Mr. Gioia off the site and out of the decision making process. Considering that he doesn't want to learn what Wikipedia's policies are, or why they exist (and his calling people who disagree with him "trolls"), I am inclined to think that is a good thing.

leereeves 4y ago
> It wouldn't be entirely unfair to say that Wikipedia's policies are designed to keep people like Mr. Gioia off the site and out of the decision making process. Why? Who is he and what has he done that might make Wikipedia dislike him?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pklausler 4y ago
  Ted Gioia is a prolific author on jazz musicology and history; I have several of his books and find them to be informative and entertaining.
chipotle_coyote 4y ago
Getting huffy about Mr. Gioia's choice of language doesn't really engage with the substance of his complaint. Is there a stated Wikipedia policy that composers must have an entry in the Grove Dictionary of Music to be considered notable? I bet there isn't. If Gioia is correct in saying that Wikipedia editors are insisting on that, then those Wikipedia editors are applying an arbitrary standard. They are, in a word, trolling. And I am inclined to think calling them out is a good thing.
- powera 4y ago
  He's not correct. One editor of six in the deletion discussion mentioned that they had checked multiple sources (including Grove) and Faulconer wasn't in them.
atoav 4y ago
Sorry, but I think that composer is relevant. So this is not about knowing policy, it is about disagreement.
- powera 4y ago
  One of the reasons for the policies is so questions such as "should this person have an article" don't devolve into popularity polls.
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    I'm sorry, but "is this musician notable" literally is a popularity contest.
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      I was about to post this.
    - powera 4y ago
      Two different objections. First, while the most written-about musicians are also generally the most popular, there isn't a strict correlation. Second, there is a vast difference between a decision-process of "if the sources provided show that this person is popular, they are notable" and "if three of the four Wikipedia editors surveyed like this person's music, they are notable".
      - _aavaa_ 4y ago
        1. You are both correct and incorrect. The most well written about musicians are the most popular by definition within the group of people who write about musicians. A) This does not mean that those musicians are popular within some sizeable portion of the general population. B) The preferences of the people writing about musicians (that wikipedia will accept as a source) are not guaranteed to be representative of the population at large, in fact I'd wager that essentially guaranteed to be not true at different points in time and for different genres. Wikipedia is choosing to conflate the popularity of an artist amongst the writing group and the popularity in the broader public. And when the two groups disagree, they are choosing to go with those who write rather than with the broader public. 2. This isn't about "the sources provided shot that he's popular", it's do we acknowledge that their contribution is defined as popular. Dragon Ball Z is/was an incredibly popular and influential anime. I guess all it takes now is for someone at WIRED who loved Dragon Ball Z to publish an article or two about them and they suddenly become notable.
jtbayly 4y ago
Wow. I thought Wikipedia was supposed to be a public resource. I wasn't aware certain people were supposed to stay off the site.
- dwringer 4y ago
  I once tried to edit an article about a scientist who had developed a bit of surrounding controversy over his studies in parapsychology. Having no real knowledge of the debate, I didn't add or remove any information; I just felt the introduction had been written in an overtly non-neutral way by a past editor. So, I removed a couple of words like "hoax" and trimmed one or two sentences so that they didn't come off as a character assassination (they had contained unsourced editorializations). Specifics aside, the article had explicitly violated Wikipedia's policies on using NPOV language. My edits were reverted within 24 hours, and the talk page was updated with an admonition to my IP address (I'd posted without logging in) claiming I'd been implicated in "unsavory" activities that could be found by Googling the IP (it was a dynamic IP, but of course I tried and found nothing) and making vague threats that I should not attempt such edits again. That's the last time I edited anything on Wikipedia.
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    That's editing. I mean, I can understand that certain people might not be great at editing. But I'm shocked that they would say there are people they don't even want on the site.
    - dwringer 4y ago
      I can't tell if you're suggesting that my edits were simply bad, and typically I would accept that is a possibility; but, even then, it was the fact that I was threatened essentially with being swatted. There was no feedback on the edits that I made. Just unfounded assertions that my IP address was involved in something "unsavory" and that I would face severe consequences if I continued such edits. It made me feel very unwelcome and I assume many other people have the same experience on Wikipedia. I realize the futility of trying to convince you that my edits were warranted, I guess. The article has since been updated, however, and the non-neutral tone that I'd tried to fix has been removed, so apparently somebody else ultimately did succeed.
tgv 4y ago
If the policy is “you must feature in Grove’s”, Wikipedia becomes even more derivative than it already is.
- erik_seaberg 4y ago
  As it was always intended be. Secondary sources only, no original research.
fcatalan 4y ago
It would be about 99% unfair. In my experience Wikipedia style moderation setups are a magnet for small minded petty martinets. Of course rules and some criteria are needed, but soon those people run over any shred of common sense while wielding them.

worik 4y ago

Pedantically: "In another bizarre case, an editor at Wikipedia told Philip Roth, “one of the most awarded American authors of his generation” (according to Wikipedia) that he was not a reliable source on the subject of Philip Roth." Philip Roth is not an authoritative source on Philip Roth. I would have thought that was obvious.

googlryas 4y ago
Philip Roth was the authoritative source on Philip Roth. In fact, he wrote a whole book about him called The Facts.
leijurv 4y ago
Some mistake or miscommunication happened there, as Wikipedia does have a policy that people can be cited for information about themselves, the policy is called SELFSOURCE. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SELFSOURCE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SELFSOURCE Perhaps the issue was that Philip Roth was unable to sufficiently demonstrate his identity? Of course, Wikipedia can't take a random editor's word when they say "I am this person and this is the truth", then anyone could say anything. There has to be some citation, for example I've seen someone cite a tweet for simple biographical information (e.g. "today is my birthday").
defen 4y ago
How does laundering the info through The New Yorker make it authoritative? Any putative fact checking for the article itself would necessarily entail asking him "Hey Phil, that article you just wrote for us about the inspiration for your best-selling, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel - was that true or were you just having a giggle?"

goldenchrome 4y ago

egberts1 4y ago

I was making a Wikipedia page back in 2004 about Deaf Cultures and Deaf Educators. Both were summarily deleted. So I started it again but under my User directory. That too got deleted. So, Wikipedia editors are inherently anti-diversity.

notafraudster 4y ago
This sounds like a bad experience. I find Wikipedia pretty daunting and I'm not surprised you got tripped up trying to edit. But as a lay person reading your post, I do not know what "Deaf Cultures and Deaf Educators" is. Is this a book? I tried googling for it but didn't find it. Wikipedia does have an article on Deaf culture (lowercase c): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture -- it was created in March of 2004. I am not sure about "Deaf educators", but Wikipedia does have an article on Deaf education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_education and on Dead studies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_studies and on Schools for the deaf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_for_the_deaf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_for_the_deaf (this one is in notable need of expansion). It looks like the separate article for Deaf education sprung into being in the early 2010s and previously redirect-merged to deaf culture. I think it's at least possible here that you were not discriminated against as part of an anti-diversity agenda, but rather that you misunderstood some of Wikipedia's needlessly complicated rules or maybe didn't present what you were trying to add in the right way. I went back through the articles for deletion discussion for all of 2004 and could not find a discussion about deleting an article by the name you said. I went through the full list of deleted articles in 2001-2004 -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_log https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_log -- and searched for "deaf" and didn't find anything relevant ever. If your pages were deleted after 2004, they're only visible in the modern deletion log and that requires an exact title match unless you're an administrator, which I am not. So unfortunately I think without more information it's going to be hard to help you 18 years later. But I'm pretty sure it was not because Wikipedia editors were anti-diversity.
- egberts1 4y ago

stevenjgarner 4y ago

There is a redirecting Wikipedia page for Bruce Faulconer [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Ball_Z https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Ball_Z

jtbayly 4y ago
And there is a link from the Dragon Ball Z page where its music is discussed to the Bruce Faulconer page (which existed for 15 years, but no longer does), but that page then redirects back to the Dragon Ball Z page. Seems pretty dumb.

guender 4y ago

oezi 4y ago

Now that Google is down-ranking Wikipedia anyway couldn't Wikipedia relax their notability requirements? I understood why they didn't want anybody to create a marketing page for themselves ten years ago, but I don't understand the rational now. The long term goal for Wikipedia should be to collect information on anything that is of interest to one or more person.

peterlk 4y ago
Wikipedia actually seems like a good replacement for personal "websites" in the social media era. I'd love to see the wikimedia social network
- standardUser 4y ago
  Do you mean this? https://wt.social/ https://wt.social/ I joined long ago but have never used it.
tshaddox 4y ago
> The long term goal for Wikipedia should be to collect information on anything that is of interest to one or more person. That is very explicitly not a goal of Wikipedia. Of course you're free to disagree with what Wikipedia ought to be, but they're at least fairly clear and explicit about their own goals.
echelon 4y ago
> Now that Google is down-ranking Wikipedia anyway Can you expand on this? I wasn't aware Google penalized Wikipedia now. Why?
- Viliam1234 4y ago
  Just a guess, but probably because Wikipedia does not contain AdSense, so there is no money in putting it to the search results. No one would officially admit this, of course, but whenever I see that Google prioritizes X over Y, X is usually a type of thing more likely to contain AdSense than Y.

BrainVirus 4y ago

Wikipedia is a cautionary tale of what will inevitably happen if you try to hypercentralize information at the Internet scale. It's broken on every conceivable level, and yet people stubbornly cling to the myth that was formed around it circa 2005. Instead of being surprised at things over and over again, I think it's time to adjust our collective expectations to match the reality.

themodelplumber 4y ago
All models are broken, some are useful... Wikipedia works really, really well at specific points of leverage. It can change over time but the most likely-successful change will still center on building from leverage points outward.
CharlesW 4y ago
> Wikipedia is a cautionary tale of what will inevitably happen if you try to hypercentralize information at the Internet scale. "Decentralized" <> "unmoderated", "without content standards", or "without editors". Is there a more decentralized knowledge resource of general significance? Hosting happens to be centralized, only because nobody else cares enough to rehost it themselves (which the license allows you to do).
mhh__ 4y ago
> It's broken on every conceivable level And yet it's still really good. People like Larry Sanger prattle on about how awful wikipedia is (and make multiple websites for collecting mistakes, which mostly seem to be blank), rarely with any concrete evidence. In fact Sanger in particular refuses to browse wikipedia at all - except that he does but through a proxy, because giving wikipedia.org traffic is "icky". I pointed out that this is childish behaviour and he blocked me, go figure.
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  As many problems as Wikipedia has, and it surely has them, it's amazing how useful it remains despite those problems, and it's the only thing we have like it. Stack Overflow is similar: you can make it look pretty bad case by case, yet it's an unchallenged best of breed despite its warts. Maybe there's no perfect way to run these massive operations just like there is no clean, pretty answer to "should this article exist?" no matter where you set the bar.

stevenjgarner 4y ago

Wikipedia includes entries based on notability, but they have their own idea on notability. A friend of mine is a famous voice actor who has won not one but two CLIO awards. Wikipedia deleted the page I created for him on the basis that he was not notable. Another page I created was for the person who introduced deaf sign language to New Zealand. Deleted as she was not notable. There are more than 19,000 entries for CLIO awards [0] from 62 countries yet only 18 Clio Awards juries comprised of industry leaders from across the globe awarded 13 Grand Clios in 2020/2021 [1]. The Global Advertising Agencies Market Size in 2022 was worth approx. $332.1 billion [2]. By comparison the Academy Awards give out Oscars in 24 categories [3] to nominees selected from only 9,921 members [4]. The Motion Picture Association released a new report on the international box office and home entertainment market showing that the industry reached $101 billion USD in 2019 [5]. Oscars are considered notable. CLIOs are not. It would appear that making art is notable (except in the sad case of Bruce Faulconer), while impacting an entire industry or contributing to marketing or education in a highly visibly recognized manner is not. [0] https://clios.com/ https://clios.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clio_Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clio_Awards [2] https://www.ibisworld.com/global/market-size/global-advertising-agencies/ https://www.ibisworld.com/global/market-size/global-advertis... [3] https://www.britannica.com/art/Academy-Award https://www.britannica.com/art/Academy-Award [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_Motion_Picture_Arts_and_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_Motion_Picture_Arts... [5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosaescandon/2020/03/12/the-film-industry-made-a-record-breaking-100-billion-last-year/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosaescandon/2020/03/12/the-fil...

kupopuffs 4y ago
Sounds like The Clio Awards need to get the word out
- stevenjgarner 4y ago
  Talk to anybody in advertising, marketing, radio and television ... believe me they know what a CLIO is (and get paid accordingly). There are so many industry specialties now, that to be a dominant player in one may render you virtually unknown in all others.

glasshug 4y ago

Please read the discussion that deleted this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bruce_Faulconer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... It's a hard problem. Volunteer editors are spread thinly over millions of articles, some of which (like "Bruce Faulconer") are about living people that are really important to get right.[1] The project has settled on the guideline of _notability_, meaning that articles are kept only if they have significant coverage in reliable sources.[2] Proving a negative is not really possible, but it works okay most of the time. It's worth thinking about alternate policies you could set up.[3] You could decide deletion based on whether a figure were "known and beloved all over the world," as the author suggests, which is difficult to define. You could could keep everything,[4] which some alternate Wikis have tried. You get unmaintained pages and probably libel. Gioia criticizes the barrier to contribution, which is also a difficult balance to reach. Some processes are just inherently complex and involve reaching consensus among hundreds of people. Others could be simplified, but every hour spent discussing and implementing improvements is an hour taken from improving the content. The policies are under constant discussion and change,[5] and no one thinks we've reached the perfect balance between these constraints. See, for example, this month's headline case at the Arbitration Committee around deletion.[6] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i... [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Conduct_in_deletion-related_editing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

Robotbeat 4y ago
It seems to me that erroring on the side of not deleting is probably a better policy.
- ranger207 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

unixbane 4y ago

> A few days ago, composer Bruce Faulconer found that his Wikipedia entry had suddenly disappeared. This was surprising because his music is known and beloved all over the world—in fact, it has been heard in more than 80 countries. Hmmm how do I already know from the first paragraph this article is bogus? Let me search this person I've never heard of. Oh, there's nothing. He's literally not noteable. "Heard in more than 80 countries" is something small independent internet artists did 20 years ago, and they didn't get wikipedia pages either.

causi 4y ago
Dude he's the guy that did the music for Dragonball, a thirty billion dollar franchise. I'm shocked he was removed from Wikipedia.
- mynameishere 4y ago
  While I've never heard of Dragonball--and I'm sure it's really great--I'll make a wild guess that 100s or 1000s of people worked on it in one capacity or another and that doesn't really make them "Notable".
  - meowface 4y ago
    It's probably the #1 most well-known anime in the US.
    - mynameishere 4y ago
      That sounds great. I was actually thinking "video game" but didn't bother looking it up because it's not really that important, is it after all? But I can think of some other musicians who've worked on cartoons--David Bowie, Roger Waters, Primus, uh, Art Garfunkel. One thing they have in common is their notability didn't really come from that type of work. Straining a bit through the mists of time, I suppose Frank Churchill is genuinely notable for his cartoon work. Matt and Trey, of course, but they are writing show tunes for fun, it seems. I mean, it's incidental music, right? Hollywood has lots of people who do that. No one cares about them either.

armchairhacker 4y ago

Honestly even if he isn’t famous why can’t Wikipedia keep his entry? Why does Wikipedia even have “notable” requirements anyways? There’s not a storage issue. Wikipedia can literally have billions of articles and still be easy to maintain. There’s not really a quality issue. Wikipedia is known for not being 100% reliable. But moreover, they have tons of ways to denote “this article needs citations” and “this isn’t a reliable source”. If Wikipedia is concerned about quality, they can have “verified” and “contributed” articles, just like how distros have “stable” and “user-contributed / experimental”. Spammers and useless content? This is an issue. But this guy is clearly not spam, the proof being any of his official works. I do agree that Wikipedia authors should remove “spammy” entries and entries on complete nobodies and random things, but you shouldn’t need to be in an Oxford journal to not be considered a “nobody”. Even things which are famous in small towns and 1000-member groups should be on Wikipedia IMO, because most of the stuff is already on there is about as relevant to me or anyone else (which is to say, pretty irrelevant). If you want relevant content, that’s what the search tools and indexing are for. Wikipedia is supposed to be “the grand encyclopedia” where you can find info on basically anything. There are already tons of Wikipedia articles on obscure people, places, and things. Way more obscure than this composer even if he isn’t truly well-known. Why does “relevance” even matter?

bazoom42 4y ago
Anybody can already create their own web page or wiki following their own policies. The reason people want their content on Wikipedia is because a Wikipedia page signal a certain notability compared to a random web page. So the inclusionists want to eat the cake and keep it too.
derefr 4y ago
> Why does Wikipedia even have “notable” requirements anyways? Think of it like code in an active open-source project. Someone needs to maintain the article: update it when house style changes, evaluate any new contributions to it as being valid or not, etc. Like code experiencing code-rot, a Wikipedia article rots if editors don't give it active attention. This has exactly the implications you'd expect: it means that articles about things that don't change, are easier to keep around than are articles about things that might change; which are in turn easier to keep around than are articles about things that definitely will change. Living people — where the article is basically living biography for them — are in that last category. The "notability" requirement can be translated into editor-ese as a combination of 1. "how many people could we find who could contribute to this page", and 2. "how much demand is there for Wikipedia — rather than some other website — to do the work of keeping this." Re: the first point about contribution, this is why Wikipedia doesn't let people be their own primary source — it's because, when that primary-source person eventually stops maintaining the page, who will then be able to take over the maintenance? If that's "nobody", then to prevent that, the page shouldn't be allowed in the first place. Re: the second point about demand — the Pokemon Pikachu has its own Wikipedia page, because people expect Wikipedia specifically to have an article about Pikachu. Other Pokemon do not — because there's already Bulbapedia around to satisfy the demand for an encyclopedia with articles about Pokemon, and the pages from it are easily found in any search engine. If a different set of editors are willing to take on the maintenance burden for those articles in their own domain — and are doing a decent job of it — then why should Wikipedia's editors duplicate that effort?

lucideer 4y ago

Plenty of comments on here suggesting WP relaxing/removing notability requirements: the problem is deeper. WP could retain the exact notability requirements they currently have, as written, and still vastly improve the situation from the current mess. As it stands: - mentions of any thing or person without a pre-existing article (by extension meeting notability requirements) are quickly deleted by fans of the frequently referenced "Write the Article First" essay[0]. While this essay is clearly labelled as an opinion piece, not policy, that opinion is staunchly defended by people with more time on their hands than you do. - Any effort to follow the essay's advice and actually create a new article is quickly curbed: despite the notability requirements policies containing detailed sections on the benefits of "stubs" as prompts to grow useful article content, newly minted articles are summarily deleted if they are not perfect on first draft (and extremely comprehensively referenced). When I first started contributing to Wikipedia almost 2 decades ago, these articles and similar debates between cohorts of "deletionists", etc. certainly existed, but what looks to have happened over the years is that the most progressive of those cohorts left, probably tired of constantly grappling with the hostilities of those with seemingly nothing better to do than to pour all of their hours into making Wikipedia their staunchly defended castle. Becoming a new contributor to Wikipedia today involves a barrier to entry only zealots will bother to spend time overcoming. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Write_the_article_first https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Write_the_article_...

Victerius 4y ago
> Becoming a new contributor to Wikipedia today involves a barrier to entry only zealots will bother to spend time overcoming. The current editors and admins will die someday. Who will replace them? If only the worst kind of people bother making the effort to become the next editors and admins, then Wikipedia will decline in quality and eventually die and be replaced by other sources, like fandom.
bpeebles 4y ago
I'd say its hard to start as a new Wikipedia editor if you only goal is to make article X or make huge changes to article Y that is somewhat controversial. On the other hand, if you start in Wikipedia by doing simple edits in non-controversial subjects (which does improve Wikipedia, and thus, the Internet given how many search engines just scrape Wikipedia for search results), start making making some new articles in notable things that are also not controversial, then you can start understanding how to get controversial (but correct) things added and changed. Yes, that takes longer and is more work, but at the same time, similar to open source software, you have to spend time learning how to code and how to make valuable and correct PRs to make major overhauls to heavily used software.

thrdbndndn 4y ago

I probably will side with Wikipedia this time. As mentioned in the discussion page [1], there doesn't seem to have any coverage from mass media about him, the only opponent in the discussion lists a bunch of sources/references that are either database-type websites, attendance lists, or product credit. These unfortunately don't really count, any professionals would have such things to a degree. Also it looks like he self-edited the page [2]. This isn't strictly prohibited AFAIK, but it will raise self-promotion [3] red flag and obviously there were hardly any references in his editing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bruce_Faulconer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bruce_Faulconer&diff=1097113662&oldid=1097112408 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bruce_Faulconer&d... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest

barnabee 4y ago
The idea of an encyclopaedia that only includes topics with significant mass media coverage is both incredibly crass and extremely depressing. If that is the primary standard for inclusion (or “notability”) it is a huge shame and a wasted opportunity.
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  > an encyclopaedia that .. Wikipedia has the loosest standard of inclusion among any encyclopedia ever existed, not sure why that's depressing.
  - barnabee 4y ago
    Because it is a much tighter “standard” than it needs to be given the constraints. It is depressing to think of all the effort that people put into writing articles that no one can ever benefit from, knowing there’s no good reason for their work to be wasted in this way.
    - bazoom42 4y ago

kevinpet 4y ago

> Just a few months before Donna Strickland won the Nobel, a Wikipedia editor had smugly insisted that she wasn’t a notable physicist. I heard about this at the time, and it stood out to me as totally missing the point. It's completely 100% possible that winning the Nobel Prize elevated Dr. Strickland from not notable to notable. A physicist who has done work that could win a Nobel Prize is probably getting close to notable but it's hard for an encyclopedia that doesn't engage in original research to adjudicate that. Actually winning is that third party recognition that wikipedia's notability standards are supposed to rely on.

hyperpape 4y ago
This isn't the case. I'm familiar with the standards applied for living philosophers, and they fall far short of the level of "future Nobel prize winner" (A quick glance at Wikipedia show I took classes from 7 such individuals while in grad school). Similarly for physicists: there are over 1000 21st century physicists listed on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:21st-century_physicists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:21st-century_physicis....
- kevinpet 4y ago
  You misrepresent my claim. I said it is natural to assume that someone who has done work that will earn a Nobel prize is at least approaching notability. I did not say that is required for notability. I'm not a wikipedia expert but many of those don't meet their criteria for notability. Taking the first in the Canadian physicists category, I get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Abella https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Abella The only non-primary source that isn't an obituary is Who's Who in Science and Engineering. He objectively doesn't meet the criteria listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academic... I can't find the original pre-deletion article, but the edit comments mention that Strickland was a past president of the Optical Society. The guidelines for notability contemplate this sort of thing when they say "The person has been an elected member of a highly selective and prestigious scholarly society or association (e.g., a National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society)". There are lots of other criteria, but that's one of them, and we can recognize that the Optical Society is not in the same category. You can say wikipedia's notability criteria are inconsistently applied. I'm not surprised. But most of these complaints amount to asking wikipedia to recognize inherent merit, which it doesn't do. Wikipedia correctly recognized Strickland's notability after the Nobel committee recognized her merit and accomplishments. Interestingly, while responding to this I noticed that the article we are discussing here, when talking about Strickland, probably misrepresents things. The edit history on wikipedia shows an article was created and then deleted in 2014, not "just a few months before Donna Strickland won the Nobel". The Washington Post article cited in the previous sentence doesn't support that claim either. So part of what we are discussing here includes supposed facts which might be fully invented or significantly distorted by the reporter.

themodelplumber 4y ago

Not sure if this has changed, but I wish there was a way to kind of dull the downside-edge of this kind of outcome. For example maybe there's another place the person's info can go that's not so obviously a trash can, and ideally even still a useful or interesting place. It ought to be possible, IMO. And I'll add that noteworthiness is a real cringe of a model in a lot of ways. Personally I saw the downsides of this first hand back in the early 2000s, when I created a page for a software developer. It didn't seem right to put their information, much of which was interesting and relevant, but which wasn't related to the software, on the software's page. So anyway, their page was deleted with the note that his info should probably just go on that one app's page. A really shallow/easy suggestion especially given that it had already been considered and didn't make sense in various ways. And then I realized: This whole thing has created extra pain for someone, who for years had a Wikipedia page, and who now has had it deleted. None of which was their choice, but all of which started with intentions to inform and build on a useful corpus of knowledge. So, is that pain-side really, really necessary? I think such a process can be done better.

ilikehurdles 4y ago
Wikipedia commingles the “facts” with the organization of those facts. What Wikipedia really is, is that organizational structure. Whether a developer has their own page, or is mentioned on the page of a product they created, is irrelevant in that both views acknowledge the same facts: the developer exists and the product exists and these things are related in that the developer created it. It would be interesting if the database of facts driving Wikipedia were available to all, and Wikipedia is recognized as providing one of potentially many ways to organize/publish that database for human reading. In other words, if I want to add information about a composer and her composition to the database I can do so, and if Wikipedia chooses only to publish the composition but not the composer, that is entirely their decision.

shp0ngle 4y ago

As a wikipedia contributor, I disagree. You don’t automatically deserve Wikipedia article because you exist, or even because you did a good job your whole life. Even if you have tons of credits on IMDV. You don’t “deserve” wikipedia article. It’s not a collection of everything that exists ever. The criteria for notability on wikipedia are actually quite clear and documented. It’s not a badge for a job well done… And if you disagree with that - fine, it’s creative commons, you can easily get all the articles with all their histories (wikipedia helpfully dumps all that periodically every day as giant XML), and the software is open source; you can fork it and create article on every living human being that ever existed.

onli 4y ago
Thanks for this comment. It is the essence of why for me the Wikipedia project can't die soon enough. The criteria for notability on wikipedia are not clear and documented. They are a joke, with a camp of zealots deleting everything they can delete - maybe they see it as a hobby, maybe they need it to feel powerful. The criteria do not matter as long as such people are allowed to wield power. And the english Wikipedia is actually the good one in this category, the german is already completely broken because of this clientele. You are right, it could be forked, but in practice it's unlikely humanity has the capacity to run two such projects. Thus Wikipedia - if it does not course correct - will sink slowly into irrelevance, be flanked with better wikis for specific topics (sadly often proprietary platforms/commercial projects) and then, hopefully, what you describe will really happen and a new Wikipedia will be forked, learning from the mistakes that are completely obvious to everyone outside of that current in-group of contributors.
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  Note, I don’t wield any power on Wikipedia, I am a small time contributor that nominate something for deletion, about 3 times per year. The rules are here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability The humanity actually cannot meaningfully have an article about every person in human history, and have some standard for quality. There do need to be notability guidelines. But. People are complaining about this stuff for decades now, and wikipedia is not going anywhere. So that’s good. I do hate inscrutable wikipedia bureaucracy too though. It’s almost impossible to navigate the maze of projects and rules and committees. But that’s a different issue.

chiph 4y ago

From what I've seen, the key to keeping pages up on Wikipedia is to have a lot of verifiable references & citations. If you do this like you're writing a college paper, rogue editors have much less power. Challenges to their reverts & deletions are also more likely to succeed. A good example of this is the article for the unloved Honda Ridgeline pickup. Jalopnik did an article about how the Wikipedia page for it is astonishingly detailed and (exhaustively) referenced. https://jalopnik.com/the-story-behind-the-honda-ridgelines-wildly-unusually-1821813634 https://jalopnik.com/the-story-behind-the-honda-ridgelines-w...

lucideer 4y ago
> rogue editors [...] power The problem is that this takes SO MUCH time and energy. Most give up. Taking time out of your day to voluntarily improve a free resource is already energy intensive without also expending that energy battling with zealots. Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying providing proper references takes too much time, I'm saying that having to fight with people to be permitted to keep content while building references takes much more energy again.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago

The author is calling everyone who doesn't agree with him about Faulconer's notability a "troll" (and more times than one in the article). >> In the spirit of Wikipedia procedures and reliable source documents, I want to add a few endnotes to this article. >> TROLLS (Par. 3): Here’s my conversation with Faulconer on the use of this word: >> Ted: People may question the suitability of the word trolls here—some of these trolls are Wikipedia editors >> Bruce: When they act in this way, they behave like trolls. So it’s a fair word. >> Ted: Yes, that’s my considered judgment too. That's not a "considered judgement". That's just a flame. Very disappointing.

hitekker 4y ago
It’s a fun, relevant metaphor. Some folks live under a bridge and have nothing to do but to harass travelers. Trolls don’t own the bridge and they certainly shouldn’t be demanding tolls and taxes. But their position has stunted their minds and twisted their hearts. They’ve spent too much time wallowing in the unreal realm of the internet; they fear the light of day. If people were to shine a light on them, they’d die of embarrassment.

JanneVee 4y ago

It is things like this that has reduced the usefulness of wikipedia for me personally. I wasn't aware of the whole "notability deletionists" before I tried to look up the Rockstar programming language when discussing esoteric programming languages a while back. I knew that there was a entry there it was a nice short introduction to it but it was deleted by these people. In one way it is piece of "programmer culture" that was removed but at the other hand it is an esoteric programming language so it might not be "notable" almost by definition. This article highlights the slippery slope of it. It is one thing to remove the esoteric language that nobody is seriously using but has a little cultural significance except for a small number of programmer nerds like myself. This composer is actually notable in comparison. Who gets to decide notability? What is next? Are we going to be removing lore from small ethnic groups because there isn't some academic reference to it and someone dutifully transcribed oral tradition and translated a language which only a few speak... No not notable...

mixmastamyk 4y ago

Reminds me of a few months back when I tried to link Amy Winehouse's "Mr. Magic" to the great original Grover Washington piece of the same name. Same name, same music, some Wikipedia support in other places, though not extensive. Both on Youtube, takes seconds to confirm. Some pedanto reverts it every time I tried. Says "it's not in the booklet" (of the CD). Believe the thinking is that reality is not good enough, it must be confirmed by an authority. A disturbing enough idea in itself.

dmitrygr 4y ago

Wikipedia is a joke nowadays. I made a small correction on the ARM Cortex-M page (the listed instructions available in ARMv8-M base were wrong), I cited the relevant ARM document in the change. Nope, got reverted back to the wrong thing... Pretty sure I know this architecture approximately 1000% better than the joker who reverted this, but OK, whatever, let everyone have the wrong info. I gave up.

picture 4y ago
I just happened to notice your edit on the Cortex-M page when correcting a typo. As far as I can tell, it doesn't look like your edit was reverted. All of your changes are still present on the current version. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ARM_Cortex-M&type=revision&diff=1101268509&oldid=1088805775&diffmode=source https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ARM_Cortex-M&type...
- dmitrygr 4y ago
  That was a second attempt a few years later when I decided to try again. First time was while not logged in.

throwawayarnty 4y ago

I found Wikipedia most inconsistent when dealing with academics. Whether living academics are included or not has no relationship with whether they are prominent or influential. That is, May prominent academics do not have wiki pages, and many academics with wiki pages are not prominent. Eg Donna Strickland did not have a wiki page until after it was announced that she won the Nobel prize. People who win Nobel prizes are not overnight successes and were prominent long before getting their prize.

8bitsrule 4y ago

It's clear that B.F. has been connected with Dragon Ball Z - until 2003. The name-link has been redirected to that page. IMDB knows he continued to write music for TV series a couple of times ... up through 2013. So? Lots of people have jobs in the music industry. What makes each of them notable? He has his own website, if anyone has to know more. There are thousands of people sure they oughta have a WP page. I'm glad WP doesn't always agree.

mirages 4y ago

Just adding wikipedia discussion links so people can get a bit of context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bruce_Faulconer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:FaulconerProductionsMusic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:FaulconerProductions...

syrrim 4y ago

Some factor needs to determine what the content of page on wikipedia ends up being. Since "anyone can edit" (credentials are not used as a filter), the content is determined by whoever is most persistent. There are also various processes in place to ensure that content is verifiably correct, and wikipedia largely succeeds in that regard. However, basically everything else, including what information is included, and what spin is put on that information, is decided by the wikipedia editors. They succeed in this regard by being willing to spend the most amount of time camping pages, reverting any change they disagree with, and forming cabals of editors willing to stand up for one another when an editing war emerges. Given wikipedia's funding, it ought to be possible to pay for credentialed experts to curate the editorial bend of articles in their area of expertise. This would have its own issues, namely of causing a bias towards institutionally favoured interpretations, but I think that would be preferable to the status quo.