User:Geo Swan/opinions/An experiment -- are 90 percent of new articles junk?

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

update

This subpage records a collegial exchange I engaged in 39 months ago. I consider it a civil and collegial exchange, and one I learned some interesting things. I learned that the percentage of new articles added to the wikipedia included a higher percentage of bumpf than I had first imagined.

I have been requested to put diffs to the original exchange of comments. The participants were myself, User:Geo Swan and User:Coren. Diffs follow:

original exchange

The wiki guideliens recommend that those considering nominating an article for delection refrain from placing the tag to just created articles, You place the {{db}} on Brahim Yadel less than half an hour after it was created. Do you really think that is a long enough grace period to accommodate those who create articles in stages?

I took a look at the other articles you nominated for deletion recently. I think you were overly hasty and overly aggressive in your tagging of several of those. Has it ever occurred to you that your efforts wouldn't be having as negative an impact on the hardworkking volunteers who contribute new material to the wikipedia if you used less aggressive tags? Why not make more use of {{prod}}? Why not reserve {{db}} for truly non-controversial deletes of patent nonsense, or reasonable equivalent? Geo Swan 06:29, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Put simply: Track record. (Not mine, {{prod}}s'). It's not personal, but 90% of what's created will is either completely inappropriate, or quickly abandoned in less-than-stub status.

What you see if you look my my history is what survived the speedies. I admit I'm a bit more liberal in their use than some, but I rely on a second look by an admin to do the finer calls-- and the minuscule fraction that survives the speedy is usually stoked into a good article (or at least, a reasonable stub).

In the case of Brahim Yadel itself, I feel the survival of the {{db-bio}} was an error, and I stepped up to an AfD because I feel there is no way to salvage that topic into an encyclopedia article. Gitmo is notable. The gross and unforgivable violations of basic civil rights there are notable. Individual victims almost certainly are not (and that victim in particular isn't). No name recognition, only trivial coverage by media...

Don't take this personally, because it just isn't. If you feel you can demonstrate notability, do so. I've never been shy to change my mind when the article changed enough that the reason for the AfD is gone (like in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fragmentalism). All I am saying is that, as it stands, this article is not encyclopedia material and I can't see how it can be made to be. Coren 12:49, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I am going to respond to each of your points in turn:

"Ninety percent"? Do you mind if I ask where you got that figure? Are you just paraphrasing Sturgeon's Law, are you quoting someone who actually ground some statistics? Or did you draw that figure from thin air?
- I don't question that the wikipedia is a magnet fro cruft, and other inappropriate stuff. I don't question that the wikipedia requires fair and efficient procedures to purge obvious cruft, and fair and efficient procedures
- I don't question your sincerity. I am sure you think you are making a positive contribution to the wikipedia.
- I don't accept your ninety percent figure. I predict that if you or I took a snapshot of the recent changes that took place during the next ten minutes, the next hour, the next day, and saw how many of those changes survived for, I don't know, a week, or a month, we would find that far more than 90% of them survived. Further, I think if we examined those changes in detail, we would find that of the remainder, that didn't seem to have survived, on first glance, many of them served as an intermediate step to a perfectly acceptable wording.
- Let me ask you, if you ground some statistics, and found that really only 10% of what was created was crap, would you wield a lighter weapon in your edits?
Just a couple of weeks ago I had a discussion with another person whose placement of a {{db}} I found highly questionable, whose resposne was (paraphrasing): "Well, I count on the closing admin to make the final judgement. I am not really responsible. It is the closing admin who is responsible."
- Sorry, I don't accept this argument. Closing admins can not, in my experience, be counted on to check obvious things, many of them count on the nominator to have checked things like the article's edit history, and don't check themselves. There was a perfectly valid article I created, that got deleted when a vandal blanked it. The nominator didn't bother to check the article's edit history, assuming the closing admin would do so. And the closing admin didn't bother to check, assuming the nominator had done so.
- I urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to refrain from wielding {{db}}, {{prod}}, or {{afd}}, if you can't fully defend the nomination. I urge you not to rely on the closing admins.
- I wasted well over a dozen hours over irresponsible use of deletion tools when I started Allegations that Tablighi Jamaat has ties to terrorism.
  - A year and a half ago the Tablighi Jamaat article was a terrible mess, much worse than it is now. It was entirely unreferenced. Was in the midst of some vicious edit warring, and someone kept replacing it with a large piece of text that was a {{copyvio}}.
  - I added a short, referenced section, which I believed then and continue to believe now, complied with WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, and WP:VER, that briefly addressed some of the allegations Guantanamo intelligence analysts were using to justify the continued detention of Guantanamo captives.
  - That material kept being excised. Sometimes it was excised by anonymous editors. Sometimes it was excised by editors who did offer defenses for its excision -- but defenses that just weren't compliant with the wikipedia's core policies.
  - They argued that the section on the US allegations should be excised because they were flimsy, because they were unsubstantiated, because they showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the nonpolitical nature of the Tablighi movement.
  - I suggested the creation of a secondary article, about the allegations. Well, the more articulate wikipedians who were admirers of the movement didn't like that idea either.
  - I went through eight months of finding the material about the US allegations being excised, in violation of policy. So, I decided to start Allegations that Tablighi Jamaat has ties to terrorism.
  - User:Tarinth nominated my first draft for speedy deletion within one minute of the article's creation.
  - Twelve minutes after I started the article I saved a new version that fleshed out one of the accused. They took about ten minutes each.
  - I took five minutes to write User:Tarinth a note.
  - Nineteen minutes after starting the article, seven minutes after seeing it had been speedy deleted I added the {{hangon}} tag, and then opened up Talk:Allegations that Tablighi Jamaat has ties to terrorism to write my justification for its preservation.
  - I took the mistake of being thorough.and finished my justification an hour later -- only to find that User:J_Di had finalized the speedy deletion, in spite of the {{hangon}} I had placed, less than an hour after the article was created, just 38 minutes after I put the {{hangon}} tag.
- Big deal right? I could always request a deletion review, right?
  - Well, deletion review was a new process for me. I had to figure out how to initiate one. It took days. And, the admin who closed the delection review thought it was appropriate to send the newly restored article to {{afd}}. There is absolutely no way I should have had to waste all that time.
- {{Db}} and {{afd}} are very heavy-handed tools, and I feel very strongly that they should be reserved for truly clear-cut cases.
- I feel very strongly that those who apply these tools should fully comply with the guidelines -- including not applying deletion tags to newly created articles. The less than one minute that User:Tarinth provided was clearly far, far too short. Do you really feel that the half hour you provided was a long enough grace period?
You feel that that the failure of your original {{db-bio}} was a mistake?
- So, why the immediate jump to {{afd}}?
  - Your choices included waiting a day or two, to see how the article shaped up.
  - Your choices included expressing your concern with the article on its talk page.
  - Your choices included applying the {{prod}} tag.
- I don't know how many {{afd}} you have participated in because an article you started, or were a contributor to, was nominated for deletion. If you haven't ever been on the other side let me assure you that it is an extremely unpleasant experience. Although the wikipedia has important policies, like: WP:CIV, and WP:BITE, they are routinely ignored by many of the regular partcipants in those fora. Some of the regular participants, including some who are long time administrators are routinely sarcastic. If you are a regular {{afd}} participant, who is capable of changing your mind, then, in my experience, you are in the minority. In my experience most participants either won't respond to civil substantive replies, or civil questions. And, when they do, they are apt to respond as if they interpreted any challenge to their stated points as if they were horrible personal attacks.
I don't know if you realize this, but you haven't given any indication that you have read the additions I made since your nomination.

Cheers! Geo Swan 19:36, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Hello again. I'll use your general format in replying, so you can match up point for point.

1. The 90% figure is a rough guesstimate from direct, personal experience. Admittedly, my sample is biased since I do mostly vandal/spam hunting and new page patrol-- this is where you'll find almost all the crap. That figure doesn't apply to the 'pedia as a whole because of vigilant patrolling (and, yes, I'm tooting a bit my own horn here-- this includes what I do).

Keep an eye on the new pages for a few hours at a time, like I sometimes do. The only reason the list grows at a rate you can track is because of the constant pruning by the several editors and admins. You'd be stunned by the number of crap creations over an hour. And that's not counting marginal contents that has little hope to grow into a real article but that's just marginal enough to squeak by.

It's also important to note that by "created" I mean created, not edits as a whole. A great many people contribute what are, seemingly, minor touches to a multitude of articles but that, in the aggregate, make the featured articles what they are.

2. I agree. That's irresponsible. It's also not what I said (or meant-- I might not have been clear). Placing a {{db}} tag is, necessarily, a matter of judgment. I'm not perfect, nor would I expect anyone else to be. I feel the best system is, and will always be, a second person double checking before deleting from the tag-- that doesn't mean that it wasn't placed with deliberation, just that errors are possible.

If you want to know, I oppose admins who delete outright-- even if there is no possibility of a doubt about the article qualifying for speedy deletion, simply because I think that check and balance is indispensable.

And yes, I agree that {{db}} is a heavy-handed tool (all the more reason to have two people check each other's work when using it). But it's also a necessary, and oft-required tool.

I do, however, disagree strongly that {{afd}} is. My experience is that almost any article that escapes AfD comes out better and stronger for it-- if only because the author (and/or primary contributors) being pressed to source and justify the article, by definition, will bring it back within the guidelines. (There is a nice, long rant about hot cause of the day that lives in that almost, ask me about it some day).

As for waiting longer before putting the AfD in, you may be right. The problem is simply one of practicality: my watchlist grows by hundreds of entries per day unless I keep it trim (an exercise I often have to do twice or even three times a day). The {{db-bio}} was removed, without so much as a word why it is "not a candidate" for speedy, and without comment on the talk page. I felt, and I still feel (see below) that the article is a candidate for deletion (although, arguably, not so much for speedy), and rather than lose track of it I moved the discussion to AfD where one has to "put up or shut up", if you will, and give you and other contributors a chance to flesh out and defend the article before other editors.

3. (second point, the first got kinda merged with 2 above)

I have never had an article of mine CSD'ed or AfD'ed. Not because I'm an amazing editor, but because I've never created or been the primary contributor to an article. This is simply not where I feel I can help the 'pedia. I do small fixes here and there, add a bit of info where I can, sometimes flesh out a stub in a field I know about... and patrol changes and new pages.

But I think I know how crappy it feels. I must have had hundreds of rejections of my manuscripts before my first was accepted, and "rejection" barely covers it-- you'd be amazed at the amount of crap you can receive when what you write isn't to the taste of an editor in a bad mood. Having lived (much too) long in the slush pile, I understand how you might feel.

But that doesn't change whether the article should be deleted or not. While the process might be unpleasant, it's the best we've got. And the merits of the article alone should drive its presence on AfD, not how the author/contributor feels.

4. Yes, I do keep checking articles I've put on AfD. For that matter, I keep checking every article I've not-voted on AfD as well.

That being said, I still don't feel Brahim Yadel meets minimal notability. If I had encountered the article in its current state, I certainly wouldn't have speedied it, but I probably would have moved it to AfD.

I thought, and I still think, that emotivity and (quite justified) outrage over what's going on in Gitmo colors attempts to evaluate Brahim Yadel's personal notability. He had temporary newsworthiness as exemplar of what very many people see as monstrous behavior by the US government, coupled with the media frenzy over anything and anyone connected or suspected to be connected with terrorism, but that's it.

There is a danger, when horrible events occur, to artificially inflate the notability of individual victims so as to not appear (consciously or not) to belittle what happened to them. This has occurred on Wikipedia with 9/11, with the Columbine shooting, etc. Individual victims, no matter how bad we feel for them or how horrified we are about what happened, usually are not notable. Certainly not notable enough for an encyclopedia article.

Should we also make an article for every single victim of the WWII Holocaust? Certainly that was at least as bad as Gitmo. Or the Armenian genocide? The civil war in Rwanda?

And, yes, this is where the previously mentioned rant I was talking about is lurking. :-)

Read the guidelines dispassionately (and the bit about temporary fame), then tell me how Brahim Yadel qualifies. I'll change my mind faster than you can say "Keep".

A quick hint: if you can find me a reliable source with continuing coverage of Brahim Yadel, and that'd do the trick.

Coren 22:59, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I am working on my reply. I understand you moving it from User talk:Coren, so it doesn't clutter it up. I am going to put some energy into my reply, I would like to be able to consult what I wrote you, and maybe re-use it in a later discussion. So I created a parallel subpage in my user space. Because you can delete an article in your user space at any time. I am going to try to keep my copy of this discussion in synch with yours. Still, as a courtesy, would you give me a heads-up prior to deleting your sub-page.

Ninety percent? Last night I captured a dozen or so of the new articels taht showed up on the recent changes page. Let's see how many survive:
I'll acknowledge this is the first systematic look I have taken at new articles, I am surprised how many look like crap. But it doesn't look like 90%. For this experiment to work you and I have to keep our hands off these articles, and any {{afd}}s they might get into.

FWIW, my impression is that your approach wouldn't change even if only fifty percent of the new article were crap, correct? Cheers! Geo Swan 13:24, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
I am glad to hear that you feel you can fully stand behind your nominations.
IMO, the wikipedia has an {{afd}} subculture, that is unlike most of the wikipedia. Gross violations of WP:CIV are routine in the deletion fora. Gross violations of WP:BITE, even by long term wikipedia administrators, is routine in the deletion fora. IMO the tradition of abuse is so deeply set among your colleagues that I doubt it can be excised without a massive reform of how deletion works.
Yes, ridding the wikipedia of obvious cruft is important. But so is preserving the wikipedia as an island of civility.

"Slushpile"? You are an author? I am sorry if you have encountered abusive and unprofessional editors.
However, it seems to me, there are two important differences between your experience as a professional writer, with professional editors.
- Wikipedia contributors are volunteers, whereas, if you were submitting your work for publication in a traditional publication you were doing so as a professional. You were either doing so because you were getting paid -- or maybe you are an academic, and publications play a key role in advancing your career. I don't know how many other organizations you have participated in that use volunteers. Abusing volunteers is a no-no. You just don't do it. You aren't paying them after all.
- The editor you submitted your work to is also supposed to be a professional. If your editor is too unprofessional, they can lose their job. Your abusive professional editor is not a model we should use as an example, because the professional editor knows that professional writers have to come back. Their income count on making successful submissions to that editor, even if the editor has been abusive. Volunteers, whose efforts are primarlly spring from altruism, can and do pack it in, and say "those wikipedia self-appointed quality control patrollers are a bunch of pompous, abusive creeps, who use opaque jargan, which they won't explain, why the heck should I expose myself to their abuse again..."
Thanks for confirming that you are monitoring the article and the discussion.
I want to return to specifically discussing Brahim Yadel. I'll do so here. You can look at my rough notes at User:Geo Swan/Guantanamo/additional notes/Brahim Yadel
- Returning to Brahim Yadel... A year or so ago the English wikipedia had 700,000 articles. Now it has twice that. How big should the wikipedia grow?
  - It seems to me that one of the wikipedia's other biggest problems (other than the subculture of abuse in the deletion fora, that is...) is the total lack of any fora where wikipedians can discuss the wikipedia's future, and any fora where the pros and cons of the conflicting underlying design philosophies can explored.
  - There are competing underlying design philosophies. However, rather than having civil, meaningful discussions of the merits of these visions, proponents wait until an article that doesn't fit in their vision comes up for deletion, then they try to gang up on the author.
  - When I was in University I took a term off, and worked, as an intern, under Ted Nelson. That was some decades ago. There is no question in my mind that Ted was a genius, is a genius, and that his idea continue to hold ongoing value to those considering the wikipedia's future direction.
  - Nelson and Doug Engelbart are the two guys usually credited with inventing hypertext. It was Ted who first coined the term, about forty years ago. Ted is highly critical of the existing world wide web. He is highly critical of the unidirectional nature of http links. And he is highly critical the way links can break.
  - The wikipedia comes much closer to the ideal hypertext system Ted described.
    - Wikilinks are bidirectional. Our articles have a "what links here" button. This is a very powerful facility. It is a facility that is most powerful if most articles are small, and narrowly focussed, like the article about Brahim Yadel and the other articles about the Guantanamo captives.
    - You described those articles as "cluttering up" the wikipedia. I'd really appreciate it if you could explain what you mean by this.