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Latest comment: 4 months ago9 comments3 people in discussion
@KylieTastic: I'm rather shocked at the suggestion that the M5 in Malawi, one of the most important roads in a country of 20 million people, could be any less notable than say, the M5 motorway in the UK. If you want to see coverage in multiple independent sources, [1] will show you what a well-developed article would look like and [2] shows it makes the news. Every sentence in the article already has a citation, so I'm not sure where you want me to put these other sources. I think it's OK as it is...this article is a stub. Its purpose is to provide a seed for other editors to add on to and grow the wiki. -- Beland (talk) 19:34, 23 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
@KylieTastic: Sure, so have the links in my previous comment established notability to your satisfaction? I think the wegenwiki article shows there's quite a bit more than two sentences to say; I'm just working on other articles at the moment and don't intend to be the one to add them. I'm a bit worried we'd be propagating bias by deleting articles on major African roads, but keeping articles on extremely minor American roads like Kentucky Route 2121, which is also a stub and which has no sources other than the transportation agency that built it. -- Beland (talk) 20:06, 23 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
@Beland it's not bias - it's the basic Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines of Wikipedia. all new articles on Wikipedia have to show the subject is notable (See WP:N) which in most cases requires significant coverage (WP:SIGCOV) in multiple independent (WP:INDY) reliable sources (WP:RS). wegenwiki.nl is a wiki so not a reliable source but contains six sources that may help (I have not reviewed them) and a google search is also not a reliable source but is a good first step for finding such sources. If you "don't intend to be the one to add them" then this is pointless until someone does actually write a notable article with sources that show notability. KylieTastic (talk) 20:13, 23 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
So of course this road makes the national news in Malawi, just like the M5 Motorway (Sydney) does in Australia. There is a huge inequity in outcomes at the moment, as the Australian article is 40k with pictures and maps and tables, and the equivalent Malawi article is a stub that has just been marked for automatic deletion in 6 months, and refused permanency despite having the identified problem fixed. If the requirement for multiple general-interest sources establishing notability were enforced against American road stubs, we wouldn't have hundreds of poorly-referenced articles under Category:United States road stubs like Montana Highway 141, Idaho State Highway 47, New Mexico State Road 1113, North Dakota Highway 1804, Illinois Route 175 (which doesn't even exist anymore), Maine State Route 231, U.S. Virgin Islands Highway 66. Ditto for Category:Australia road stubs like Wilkins Highway in South Australia. Like the authors of those stubs, I didn't have to go through a gauntlet when I created stubs (which have since grown into full articles) on Massachusetts topics like Boston Neck, Fore River Railroad, Fenway-Kenmore, and Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. Is that because we've gotten better about documenting our sources over the decades, because our community of editors was less delete-happy while these early seeds were growing, because we are more likely to think of topics close to home as important, because of lingering systemic racism and post-colonial poverty reducing the number of volunteer editors from certain countries, or due to negative attitudes toward developing countries? I don't know, but plainly the results in terms of article growth are highly uneven.
I support and agree with using reliable sources to establish notability, and indeed I'm one of the early authors of WP:RS. But if we're to rectify this imbalance and not discourage editors interested in neglected topics, I think we need to be a little more careful about stomping on fragile seeds while doing the good work of keeping garbage out of the encyclopedia. Especially if for reasons out of our control (like global economic inequality) there are fewer editors interested in working on those topics. The reason I'm making a fuss here is that this kind of dismissive bureaucratic process is exactly why Wikipedia had a major scandal and the Wikimedia Foundation had to write responses like Why didn’t Wikipedia have an article on Donna Strickland, winner of a Nobel Prize? The editor trying to create that article simply didn't stick around long enough to push it through the process, and yet somehow Wikipedia managed to have biographies for all the male Nobel Prize winners which were theoretically subject to the same standards. I could maybe excuse volunteer reviewers for not being familiar enough with laser physics to know that Donna Strickland was a big deal before she got her Nobel Prize, but I have to expect editors to be able to make better judgement calls when it comes to everyday topics like roads. The next scandal could easily be, "Why does Wikipedia not have articles about major roads in Africa but has lots of articles about tiny roads in Australia and the United States?" I would be very sad if we have learned nothing and the answer is the same as it was for the Strickland incident. I would be very happy if we can find a way to make the process more cooperative and less adversarial. -- Beland (talk) 09:21, 24 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
Hi Beland. I have heard similar arguments many times where more effort appears to be in the discussion of envisaged problems than to just improve the article. My number one concern is always what the readers experience is. This well may be a very notable subject that sources exist for even a GA... but from the readers experience it's little more than "a road exists" and no indication if it is important or minor. Similarly there are several AfD discussion I've seen that list large numbers of good sources and are thusly/rightly kept but the article is unchanged and years later any reader would have no idea why the article was notable or have the sources to verify because they still don't even list the sources from the AfD. I have lists of hundreds or even thousands of notable subjects but I see no value of just creating stubs with no informational value. Yes people do take existing stubs and expand, but from my experience people are more likely to work on new articles than expand (I assume people like to be the 'creator'). Yes we have lots of poorly-referenced articles under Category:United States road stubs but most where created before the current guidelines - why add more? They should be improved or deleted. Also I would note that we have a number of US road fan editors that do tend to expand challenged articles.
I did not read the complete "Why didn’t Wikipedia have an article on Donna Strickland, winner of a Nobel Prize?" but it appears to maybe be people have different opinions but mainly the reviewer was mistaken (the Nobel Prize was sourced so that's just a bad decline). However like with most notable subjects that are declined an improvement or discussion (point reviewer to existing source) and re-submit should not just get an accept but also often improves the article for the reader. However some like to jump straight to shouting about bias with no evidence that is was anything but the reviewer missed the significance of the included sources. I've been accused of being biased against both men and women, religions and atheists and almost every other damn contradictory thing. In this case they had a source saying she was a Nobel Prize winner so notable, this article as stands says little than it's a road. This is not bias, as any article created about any road with no source or just one source would be declined at AfC.
At AfC we have endless submitters that always say "but what about...." an in most cases we can say because they where created before the current guidelines and they need to either be improved or deleted and are not a reason to add more unsourced/unverifiable content. If they bring up an article like this I really have no idea what to say. We point to Wikipedia:Notability, Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Reliable sources and they go why did those policies not apply to that editor?
My response to "these were easily found clicking through the above links" is great then why not add them? Even if just a source list and then either re-submit or move yourself as now I see your actually an admin and long standing editor. Would this have not been quicker/easier? This is what I do, for instance Andrew J. James was declined by another reviewer, i thought that was a mistake so added some sources and content and accepted. It was then challenged for copy-vio so I further tweaked to avoid deletion. You may know the M5 is notable as I knew this was notable, but is it not our responsibly to the readers to show this?
Finally re "I would be very happy if we can find a way to make the process more cooperative and less adversarial". This may be how you may see it but many do not find it so - I get thanked for the information in declines notices, comments and welcomes a lot... Yes some do take it personally but I would say more (for non junk subjects) just improve and resubmit. Ideally yes we would have enough interested reviewers to research/improve all notable subjects but we don't, not even close. Unfortunately some see a decline as a very negative thing and others as just a procedural thing. I really wish we had enough reviewers to do WP:BEFORE checks on submissions, but we don't so the onus is put on the submitters to add the sources to the article to show notability. There is always scope for improving the wording of decline notices to reduce negativity as much as possible. KylieTastic (talk) 20:11, 24 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
Donna Strickland's article was deleted before she won a Nobel Prize. My point in mentioning that example is that if Wikipedia's deletion process considered as non-notable someone whose research was so important to her field that she would soon thereafter be awarded a Nobel Prize, then the process is too heavily weighted toward deletion. If the problem is a shortage of volunteers, I think it's better to have a longer backlog than to rush to judgement in cases that clearly aren't spam, and delete articles without carefully considering them. -- Beland (talk) 02:22, 22 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
