My take is that half of this Guardian article makes an important observation about Wikipedia, and the other half tries to relitigate the whole idea of Wikipedia.
The important half: the WP I immersed myself into in 2007 was decidedly less hospitable than the image WP tries to craft for itself. There are two forces I saw that were dragging the project down: editing-as-sport (which, guilty as charged, yes) and status seeking.
pg, I think, got a faceful of the editing-as-sport problem when he looked at the articles on HN/YC topics. WP editors are encouraged to tag first and ask questions later; there's volumes and reams and bookcases and crap-tons of policy and process designed to handle those tags. However, a very vocal subset of WP users will both tag-first, and also take a personal interest in the outcome of those discussions. So if an article is AfD'd (put up for deletion) for notability concerns, and the article's a "Keep", you can bet the {{Notability}} tag is staying and every edit is going to be contested until some face-saving reorganization of the topic emerges (for instance, an omnibus "Y Combinator" article with subsections for pg and Blackwell).
The supposed nurturing atmosphere of the all-volunteer encyclopedia is meanwhile torpedoed by the status-seeking quest for adminship, in which clued-in editors are all too aware that every dispute they engage in is a contest to win or lose credibility in a future WP debate over whether they can put the gold star of adminship on their pages.
There are rationales for both these phenomenon, which I don't want to go into (rms apparently already thinks I'm a total message board geek for WP), but I'll just say that that part of the controversy over WP I think is real and valid.
The second half of the debate here is over deletionism vs. inclusionism. Here I'm less concerned. There is obviously a pervasive misunderstanding about the concept of "notability" and the overall goal of the Wikipedia project. Wikipedia is not the Hitchhiker's Guide. A decision was made long before the Guardian ever noticed WP that, in order to keep the project focussed, topics would be included or excluded based on an acid test of "Notability".
"Notability" in the WP sense isn't subjective. You're notable if reliable sources have written about you. You're not notable if they haven't. The definition of "reliable source" is pretty expansive; my impression is that it goes up to and including "blogs lots of people have heard of". It certainly includes the entire mainstream media.
You can argue that, because WP isn't paper, you should be able to include anything in it, including a "who's who" of everyone who's ever posted code to Freshmeat. You can argue that, but it's pointless to do so. That argument came and went many years ago, and it's settled. The who's-who will have to live under some other domain.
Comments
My take is that half of this Guardian article makes an important observation about Wikipedia, and the other half tries to relitigate the whole idea of Wikipedia.
The important half: the WP I immersed myself into in 2007 was decidedly less hospitable than the image WP tries to craft for itself. There are two forces I saw that were dragging the project down: editing-as-sport (which, guilty as charged, yes) and status seeking.
pg, I think, got a faceful of the editing-as-sport problem when he looked at the articles on HN/YC topics. WP editors are encouraged to tag first and ask questions later; there's volumes and reams and bookcases and crap-tons of policy and process designed to handle those tags. However, a very vocal subset of WP users will both tag-first, and also take a personal interest in the outcome of those discussions. So if an article is AfD'd (put up for deletion) for notability concerns, and the article's a "Keep", you can bet the {{Notability}} tag is staying and every edit is going to be contested until some face-saving reorganization of the topic emerges (for instance, an omnibus "Y Combinator" article with subsections for pg and Blackwell).
The supposed nurturing atmosphere of the all-volunteer encyclopedia is meanwhile torpedoed by the status-seeking quest for adminship, in which clued-in editors are all too aware that every dispute they engage in is a contest to win or lose credibility in a future WP debate over whether they can put the gold star of adminship on their pages.
There are rationales for both these phenomenon, which I don't want to go into (rms apparently already thinks I'm a total message board geek for WP), but I'll just say that that part of the controversy over WP I think is real and valid.
The second half of the debate here is over deletionism vs. inclusionism. Here I'm less concerned. There is obviously a pervasive misunderstanding about the concept of "notability" and the overall goal of the Wikipedia project. Wikipedia is not the Hitchhiker's Guide. A decision was made long before the Guardian ever noticed WP that, in order to keep the project focussed, topics would be included or excluded based on an acid test of "Notability".
"Notability" in the WP sense isn't subjective. You're notable if reliable sources have written about you. You're not notable if they haven't. The definition of "reliable source" is pretty expansive; my impression is that it goes up to and including "blogs lots of people have heard of". It certainly includes the entire mainstream media.
You can argue that, because WP isn't paper, you should be able to include anything in it, including a "who's who" of everyone who's ever posted code to Freshmeat. You can argue that, but it's pointless to do so. That argument came and went many years ago, and it's settled. The who's-who will have to live under some other domain.