Overrepresented Content on Wikipedia

[Johnny Au]

Civilization Fanatics Center (T-H-L) lasted a few years until I came along and requested its deletion. It is now deleted.

I consider video game fan sites, especially those dedicated to a certain video game franchise, part of "overrepresented content."

[Zoloft]

I'm going to slightly disagree with Eric here. Your proposing how Wikipedia's USRD can be improved is just a variation on pointing out of how badly it's broken.

I'd encourage reformers to come here and propose reforms. As has been pointed out, Wikipedia itself is no place to do so safely.

This works both for 'hasten the day' types and 'fix the problems' advocates and builds our influence.

[SB_Johnny]

I'm going to slightly disagree with Eric here. Your proposing how Wikipedia's USRD can be improved is just a variation on pointing out of how badly it's broken.

I'd encourage reformers to come here and propose reforms. As has been pointed out, Wikipedia itself is no place to do so safely.

This works both for 'hasten the day' types and 'fix the problems' advocates and builds our influence.

[SB_Johnny]

The "reason" behind all of this is as Mr. 5114 says: the mantra all along has been that:

1) "Wikipedia is not paper", so there's no reason not to have gazillions of articles on TV shows, toys, or porn stars;
2) "Wikipedia is not on a deadline", so there's no hurry about getting those actually enlightening or important articles done;
and 3) someone's sure to come along and {{fix it}} sooner or later.

So sure, why not have an article about every country lane, goat path, and truck stop? There's still plenty of room on WP for good articles about history and physics, as they say.

The problem is that the loonies have long since taken control of things, so it's much harder to get contributors with expertise in serious topics to try to work in that environment. Worse still, the WMF offices themselves are mostly staffed by the cream of the loonies who climbed the ladder and were willing to go scrumming in San Francisco.

[eagle]

The "reason" behind all of this is as Mr. 5114 says: the mantra all along has been that:

1) "Wikipedia is not paper", so there's no reason not to have gazillions of articles on TV shows, toys, or porn stars;
2) "Wikipedia is not on a deadline", so there's no hurry about getting those actually enlightening or important articles done;
and 3) someone's sure to come along and {{fix it}} sooner or later.

So sure, why not have an article about every country lane, goat path, and truck stop? There's still plenty of room on WP for good articles about history and physics, as they say.

The problem is that the loonies have long since taken control of things, so it's much harder to get contributors with expertise in serious topics to try to work in that environment. Worse still, the WMF offices themselves are mostly staffed by the cream of the loonies who climbed the ladder and were willing to go scrumming in San Francisco.

I agree that Mr. 5114 has been a good spokesman for the USRD viewpoint and with Johnny's summary above. However, the day is quickly approaching when the public, the grant-funding agencies, the telecomms kissing the Wikipedia-Zero ring, and others will demand a shift from expanding the article count to article quality control and improvement. If that shift comes, the above rationale will fade and a possible civil war between the WMF quality control squad and the overrepresented content editors may erupt.

[Scott5114]

[There's a lot of research and writing and revising and defending. If someone isn't interested in what they are writing about, none of that effort feels justified and they lose interest. If you remove something like roads from the gamut of article subjects, you're more likely to lose the road editors from the editor pool than you are to transition them to editing a different subject.

You might argue that they would be no great loss if the project were to lose an editor that was focused on an unimportant subject, but such editors accrue side benefits to the project—typo fixes, link additions and corrections, and things like that—to other, more important articles that they may encounter.

In a volunteer effort, nobody is an interchangeable cog. You have to make them want to volunteer.

There are various motivational techniques, many of which relate to the editor's self-image. If Wikipedia could attract people who aspire to be a "Renaissance Man/Woman" or an "encyclopediaist" then this would be less of a problem. I have always had an interest in roads, but not limited to the narrow definition of USRD. I understand that there are environmental, social, political and legal impacts of roads and even (gasp) a do-not-build-that-road point of view. But USRD will allow none of that. There is a highway in Maryland called the Intercounty Connector http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... =453979659 which came from a political fight and litigation that lasted more than three decades. It was a major issue in the campaign for Governor. Once the state assigned a number to the Route, USRD took it over, cut out all of the interesting stuff and sought the deletion of a "History of..." fork because such detailed coverage did not meet the prototype article design.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... _Route_200 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... _Route_200 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... on=history They force a merge of the related articles into an MD 200 article and proceeded to hack away at long-standing content. Many Road Fans refuse to see that roads are much more than lines on a map. Having Wikipedia's road coverage dictated by a POV-pushing philosoply that directly contradicts the rest of the encyclopedia is not heathy.

One way to get around this isolation of USRD would be to require contestants to review non-road articles for GA as a part of the Highway Cup, and to require non-road editors to review road articles when they are nominated for GA. There are many other ways to keep road editors from evolving into a separate species isolated from the general editor corps.

This problem extends to many areas of overrepresented content. For example, did you know that a Donald Duck Comic Book was once cited as prior art by the US Patent Office? Although that is the type of interesting fact that a Wikipedia reader may want to know, it is beyond the keen of the comic book editing crowd.

Wikipedia needs Chemists reading and editing History articles and Architects reading and editing Botany articles. Wikipedia does not need walled gardens.

I am not really familiar with the history of the MD-200 article, but from a cursory glance at the links provided and knowledge of the project itself leads me to believe that what actually happened here is not what it appears from the outside.

One key feature of USRD culture in general is a desire for uniformity in the articles. This means uniformity in article structure, both in the way an individual article is partitioned and formatted and also in the way information is split up amongst pages. Rather than splitting long articles by subtopic (History of Route X, Opposition to Route X) they are usually split by geographic area (Route X in Tennessee, Route X in Kentucky). This arrangement usually makes more sense for roads because the history of different segments of a route will often be very disparate from one another (the history of a route segment in Georgia usually won't have many effects on a segment of the same route in Michigan) and because each segment will draw on different sources. Splitting MD-200 into subarticles in this way is inconsistent with how every other state road article is handled, so many USRD editors would reflexively oppose such a split for this very reason—not because they don't want opposition coverage included in the encyclopedia. Indeed, the MD-200 article as it stands now has nine full paragraphs of discussion of opposition.

Another issue at hand was that the subarticles were spun off by Racepacket (T-C-L). I was in absentia at the time, but as I understand the situation Racepacket, who was not a member of USRD, had a history of negative interaction USRD editors, and this may have been interpreted as attempt to further provoke them, leading to pushback for that reason as well.

While the MD-200 article may not be perfect, it is currently rated C-class, meaning that the project is aware of and acknowledges that the article is not as polished and complete as it should be. Presumably if someone were to eye it as a GA or FA candidate it would be a lot more comprehensive in its coverage of both the history and the opposition to the route. My most recent FA, Creek Turnpike (T-H-L), does not shy away from opposition coverage at all (actually, writing that was a lot of fun, since I got to read a lot of goofy quotes from area residents claiming that the turnpike would give them AIDS and stuff like that).

As for your comments on GA, I fully agree that in a perfect world, road articles would be reviewed by outsiders. I would certainly welcome such reviews! However, the GAN page has become so overwhelmed with submissions from all categories of article that it is fairly common for articles to wait upwards of 90 days for a review. It's no wonder that some editors would get tired of waiting and attempt to help out other editors in their project group by reviewing their article.

[The Adversary]

Simon Pulsifer (T-H-L)
James Heilman (T-H-L)
Ting Chen (T-H-L)
Adrianne Wadewitz (T-H-L)
Rémi Mathis (T-H-L)
Justin Knapp (T-H-L) (good job getting it restored, Justin)
Martin Haase (T-H-L)
Florence Devouard (T-H-L)
Oscar van Dillen (T-H-L)
Jan-Bart de Vreede (T-H-L)

Jan-Bart de Vreede (T-H-L) is now at AfD.

Earlier, these articles have been deleted/redirected:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kat Walsh (T-H-L)
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Phoebe Ayers (T-H-L)

[Peryglus]

Jan-Bart de Vreede (T-H-L) is now at AfD.

By a single-purpose account, by the looks of it. Seems as though someone might have had an agenda.

[tarantino]

Jan-Bart de Vreede (T-H-L) is now at AfD.

By a single-purpose account, by the looks of it. Seems as though someone might have had an agenda.

That's obviously Russavia.

Here he is using an open proxy to tag the article.

[EricBarbour]

Jan-Bart de Vreede (T-H-L) is now at AfD.

By a single-purpose account, by the looks of it. Seems as though someone might have had an agenda.

That's obviously Russavia.
Here he is using an open proxy to tag the article.

I wonder how many of the "voters" at the AFD are Mr. Boobby's socks or friends. Plus, I am amazed that no WMF employees or insiders have shown up to prevent this.

[eagle]

This has proven to be an interesting thread. To summarize, so far we have identified the following areas of overrepresented content:
The Beatles
Episodes of [animated comedy] televison shows
Family trees
Fictional extraterrestials
Football (soccer) player biographies
Furry fandom
Jimi Hendrix
Middle-Earth
Netball
Porn stars
Video game fan sites
Wikipedian biographies

What have we missed?

[Kiefer.Wolfowitz]

Guitar tunings (T-H-L)?

[Johnny Au]

Them Pokémon (T-H-L)! Gotta catch 'em all!

Although I am interested in Pokémon, a few species need to be merged.

Despite the fact that I am obsessed with public transit, rapid transit stations are overrepresented. Even the most humble LRT station has its own article.

[HRIP7]

This has proven to be an interesting thread. To summarize, so far we have identified the following areas of overrepresented content:
The Beatles
Episodes of [animated comedy] televison shows
Family trees
Fictional extraterrestials
Football (soccer) player biographies
Furry fandom
Jimi Hendrix
Middle-Earth
Netball
Porn stars
Video game fan sites
Wikipedian biographies

What have we missed?

Professional wrestling.

[Cedric]

This has proven to be an interesting thread. To summarize, so far we have identified the following areas of overrepresented content:
The Beatles
Episodes of [animated comedy] televison shows
Family trees
Fictional extraterrestials
Football (soccer) player biographies
Furry fandom
Jimi Hendrix
Middle-Earth
Netball
Porn stars
Video game fan sites
Wikipedian biographies

What have we missed?

American highways
British railway stations and platforms

[eagle]

Here is one category that I can't talk about:
Category:Secret societies (T-H-L), which has 19 subcategories. Some articles meet GNG and others are Fan Cruff. Sourcing is problematic. There is also a Wikipedia:WikiProject Secret Societies (T-H-L).

Seriously, some of the articles are legitimate and show impacts beyond the organization itself: The Machine (social group) (T-H-L) but others are dubious.

[Ming]

British railway stations and platforms

Including every damn place a train has ever stopped in England (e.g. Medge Hall Halt (T-H-L)).

[Johnny Au]

Stars and planetary systems in fiction (T-H-L)

It is a huge list consisting of almost every single bright star and their hypothetical planets home to thousands of different fictional extraterrestrials with blue links.

[AL1]

British railway stations and platforms

Including every damn place a train has ever stopped in England (e.g. Medge Hall Halt (T-H-L)).

Or Coombe Junction Halt railway station (T-H-L)...

Transit articles on WP are really messy. Look at List of New York City Subway lines (T-H-L); everything is listed by "Division" and "Line" rather than the familiar "train" (i.e. the letter/number designation) to which nearly everyone would be accustomed.

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (T-H-L) article is a similarly rambling behemoth of railfan cruft and errata. Just look at the infobox; it informs the reader about the track gauge and length, but basic information such as the price of a fare is left to the main text of the article (and doesn't appear until about halfway through this 110kb article).

[Johnny Au]

Toronto Transit Commission (T-H-L) would have a hard time getting "Good Article" status.

[Johnny Au]

There is one thing in common with overrepresented content on Wikipedia: they are very much of interest to young white Anglophone males (which happens to be the most common demographic) and the overrepresented content reflects the homogeneity of Wikipedians in general.

[Poetlister]

There is one thing in common with overrepresented content on Wikipedia: they are very much of interest to young white Anglophone males (which happens to be the most common demographic) and the overrepresented content reflects the homogeneity of Wikipedians in general.

Yes, that's virtually a truism. This is an inevitable consequence of not having an editorial board to decide what is worth an article (or twenty) and what isn't.

[lilburne]

There is one thing in common with overrepresented content on Wikipedia: they are very much of interest to young white Anglophone males (which happens to be the most common demographic) and the overrepresented content reflects the homogeneity of Wikipedians in general.

That maybe so, but it isn't the cause. The real cause is that certain things lead themselves to being split. Roads, TV episodes, organisms, pop bands, pop songs, fictional characters, book series, villages in X, synagogues, etc. Each can be split into an article in a formalistic way and allows people to say that they've created 2 million articles or whatever. Greater diversity will just add to the nonsense by listing every mosque, church, baptist chapel of ease, sink well in the Kush mountains, village headman in the Congo, fish recipes, etc.

[Poetlister]

There is one thing in common with overrepresented content on Wikipedia: they are very much of interest to young white Anglophone males (which happens to be the most common demographic) and the overrepresented content reflects the homogeneity of Wikipedians in general.

That maybe so, but it isn't the cause. The real cause is that certain things lead themselves to being split. Roads, TV episodes, organisms, pop bands, pop songs, fictional characters, book series, villages in X, synagogues, etc. Each can be split into an article in a formalistic way and allows people to say that they've created 2 million articles or whatever. Greater diversity will just add to the nonsense by listing every mosque, church, baptist chapel of ease, sink well in the Kush mountains, village headman in the Congo, fish recipes, etc.

On the other hand, there might be attempts at consolidation, say grouping the five mosques in some town into one article with redirects. At the very least, we'd get more drama as people object.

[eagle]

The real cause is that certain things lead themselves to being split.

I understand your point. An alternative explanation is that they are a defined set of things, and people with Obsessive–compulsive disorder (T-H-L) have an urge to complete the Wikipedia coverage of the set. So, the number of current Pokemon characters is known and people will work until all of them have an article. Similarly, one can go to a State Department of Transportation to get a complete list of numbered roads in that state and work until all of them have an article. Some editors cannot stop until each rapid transit station on each system has its own article.

Now, when this approach breaks down, it causes untold frustration and surprising reactions. For example, long-highways which span the entire United States (such as Interstate 80 (T-H-L)) cannot be covered with the degree of detail in one article that a WikiProject may expect of shorter roads. So, Lilburne is correct that there is an impulse to split it into separate state articles. Similarly, rather than cover an entire subway system in one article, articles emerge on each separate route and finally each station on each route. Similarly, the OCD editors go from an article on an entire television series to each season to each episode.

When a long-standing extensive article is written about the Intercounty Connector (T-H-L) and is later assigned a Route Number, the WikiProject USRD seizes the article and forces it (mostly through the deletion of valid content) into that WikiProject's mold.

Some of these overrepresented content areas gain the attention of young English-speaking males. However, there could be an equal urge to cover each of Beethoven symphonies (T-H-L) (see List of compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven (T-H-L)) or each United States Supreme Court case. While one could argue that a great reference work should have a comprehensive coverage of Beethoven and the United States Supreme Court, there is not the expertise available to write all such articles, and Wikipedia has been more selective about the depth of its coverage. So, the important symphonies and cases have individual articles, and the decision to write up a few does not create a compulsion to cover the lesser ones to the same depth. That is the essence of expertise: to understand that conveying the important details of Notre Dame de Paris (T-H-L) Cathedral does not demand equal coverage of every other house of worship in the world.

After the OCD editors finish, we will have an article on every military installation, every mental institution, every community college, every hydroelectric dam, every building on the national register of historic places, etc. (Not because they are worthy of our scholarship, but because we must finish off the damned list.) In contrast, paid PR editors who seek to add businesses and corporations are not welcomed because they are motivated by dollars rather than OCD.

[joshuaism]

There is one thing in common with overrepresented content on Wikipedia: they are very much of interest to young white Anglophone males (which happens to be the most common demographic) and the overrepresented content reflects the homogeneity of Wikipedians in general.

Japanese pop culture is also highly overrepresented (someone mentioned Pokemon). Why is it so appealing to young white Algophone males?

That said, it seems that a number of pedo weeaboos, have plenty of time to document every television appearance and single released by Japanese pop idols and groups.
List of Japanese idols (T-H-L)

[Ming]

After the OCD editors finish, we will have an article on every military installation, every mental institution, every community college, every hydroelectric dam, every building on the national register of historic places, etc. (Not because they are worthy of our scholarship, but because we must finish off the damned list.) In contrast, paid PR editors who seek to add businesses and corporations are not welcomed because they are motivated by dollars rather than OCD.

Well, we will have articles on every video game creator and company.

[Johnny Au]

After the OCD editors finish, we will have an article on every military installation, every mental institution, every community college, every hydroelectric dam, every building on the national register of historic places, etc. (Not because they are worthy of our scholarship, but because we must finish off the ****ed list.) In contrast, paid PR editors who seek to add businesses and corporations are not welcomed because they are motivated by dollars rather than OCD.

Well, we will have articles on every video game creator and company.

Oh Merciless One, there is no article on The Floor is Jelly (T-H-L) as of this post.

[lilburne]

The real cause is that certain things lead themselves to being split.

That is the essence of expertise: to understand that conveying the important details of Notre Dame de Paris (T-H-L) Cathedral does not demand equal coverage of every other house of worship in the world.

OTOH I just got back from 10 days in France (2000 mile car drive) I have something approaching 2000 images of medieval stonework, stained glass, and effigies. These will eventually get cataloged, tagged, and used to build a database of images showing the representations of themes and ideas across several hundred years in different regions. Yesterday I picked up a book that was cross-referencing stonework (sculpture) from churches built between 1120 and 1160 in one English county, how it related to stonework from the same period in Normandy, and how the patrons may have influenced the cross fertilization in the designs.

a.jpg

[Ming]

Oh Merciless One, there is no article on The Floor is Jelly (T-H-L) as of this post.

Not yet....

[eagle]

The real cause is that certain things lead themselves to being split.

That is the essence of expertise: to understand that conveying the important details of Notre Dame de Paris (T-H-L) Cathedral does not demand equal coverage of every other house of worship in the world.

OTOH I just got back from 10 days in France (2000 mile car drive) I have something approaching 2000 images of medieval stonework, stained glass, and effigies. These will eventually get cataloged, tagged, and used to build a database of images showing the representations of themes and ideas across several hundred years in different regions. Yesterday I picked up a book that was cross-referencing stonework (sculpture) from churches built between 1120 and 1160 in one English county, how it related to stonework from the same period in Normandy, and how the patrons may have influenced the cross fertilization in the designs.

Lilburne's journey is admirable and his research is beyond my professional expertise. I hope that his images enter a specialized database rather than Commons. Similarly, I deeply respect the chemists who have curated a computerized database of mass spectra which will never go into Commons. The intelligence and expertise necessary to build a stonework database or a mass spectra database is different than what it takes to build a collection of US Roads or Pokemon characters. What is contained in the stonework or mass spectra databases is reliable, but incomplete. We will never document every carved stone and we will never finish the task of collecting mass spectra. However, the deeper analysis and sense of priority that experts bring to those fields (which Wikipedia would call "original research") is completely different than the OCD output of the Roads and Pokemon articles. The fact that those areas deal with vague patterns rather than finite sets make them unattractive to OCD editors.

For example, there are not a finite number of rings around the plant Uranus (Rings of Uranus (T-H-L)), but there are a finite number of astronomers who wrote the paper about the discovery so it is easier to write about them (only one does not currently have a Wikipedia biography.) Wikipedia covers the rings in a single article which deserved its featured status. Imagine what trash would replace it if someone from USRD decided to break that featured article into a ring-by-ring series of articles.

[Johnny Au]

Every single named asteroid has a Wikipedia article. Soon enough, asteroids the size of one's fist would have their own articles. Yes, there are more asteroids in the solar system than there are Twitter users or even Facebook users.

Even worse, given that a gas giant's rings are made up of very small satellites orbiting together, it would be bad if Wikipedia has an article on every piece of ice and/or rock that makes up the rings of each gas giant.

[HRIP7]

This discussion reminds me of the recent Guardian editorial:

The deep problem for Wikipedia is that an encyclopedia must not just be accurate in its treatment of factual subjects. It must also have sound judgment about what matters. The apparently insatiable demands of the public for lists is a plea to know what is important in a world of trivia. That’s a judgment that Wikipedia hoped to avoid, or to render “objective”, but it can’t in reality be evaded. Notability is a necessarily subjective quality, which doesn’t make it arbitrary nor mean that it doesn’t exist.

It matters that Wikipedia should get better. For one thing, it has killed off all the competition. People are no longer willing to pay a premium for the views of experts and rival encyclopedias have shrivelled off the web. Like it or not, Wikipedia is now the starting point and all too often the terminus, of almost any attempt to research online. The problem of ensuring that collaboration among volunteers will produce accurate information can be solved: online discussion works very well to produce answers to questions that have clearly right answers. Computer programming, for example, would be almost impossible without the resources supplied by Google and Stack Exchange. But much of the world’s most valuable knowledge is not of that sort, and is lost when it is treated as if it were. The real danger of Wikipedia is not that it contains errors of fact, but that it reinforces a flawed understanding of knowledge. The dream of freedom became rule by a thousand Gradgrinds.

[JCM]

One way to address the concerns raised above is to create prospectuses for each of the major topics with indicators of what topics are covered in the major reference works or even minor reference works related to a specific topic and the relative amount of space those reference sources give those topics. While it is possible to do that it is also extremely time consuming. I spent most of my day off today just generating lists of the currently well regarded encyclopedic reference sources from the Guide to Reference website and that was just to get all the titles. Lists of articles in those titles generally take at least a few days per short single volume work.

[lilburne]

We will never document every carved stone and we will never finish the task of collecting mass spectra. However, the deeper analysis and sense of priority that experts bring to those fields (which Wikipedia would call "original research") is completely different than the OCD output of the Roads and Pokemon articles. The fact that those areas deal with vague patterns rather than finite sets make them unattractive to OCD editors.

Take the Loire valley and the small village churches, many of them date from the 11th-13th centuries, throw out a radius of say 20 miles from any centre, and you'll see the development of the Gothic from the Romanesque in the fabric of the buildings. Inside the buildings will be evidence of the medieval cults that flourished, much of the older stuff is gone since the iconoclasts had their way in the 20-30 years after the Revolution, but enough remains in the statues and shrines. Its a wine producing region so one of the major cults is that of St Vincent, many of the churches will have a painted wooden statue from the 14th or 16th century, talk to the locals and they'll proudly point out THEIR statue of St Vincent. In late January some places still parade the statue around the village boundaries. The statue of the cults was a sort of status symbol and they'll have been commissioned as part of some bequest from regional workshops "A statue of St Vincent, of the same quality or better as the one in X". Come forward to the 19th century and the villages are replacing the stained glass. There were two main producers of stained glass in the area at the time, so the communities are mostly commissioning stained glass windows with St Vincent from one or other producer. Now you have the interesting spectacle of how these 19th century manufacturers and designers created variations of the image (they all had to have a bunch of grapes in one hand and a martyr's palm in the other) as no community wanted the exact same stained glass window as the one down the road. There is a whole bunch of research surrounding the reuse of cartoons by the major workshops in both France and the UK.

The UK is further interesting as a number of the makers didn't always label their works, and the designers were trained in one workshop, eventually became main designers, and then left to create their own businesses. Additionally they all did work for each other. So you can look at one window and it can be hard to distinguish the maker. The churches themselves have no record, and a number of the companies lost all their records during WW2. The work of Burliston and Grylls appears all over the UK, the records were lost when their headquarters were destroyed during the blitz. No record exists of where the output of this company ended up, and the works may be attributed to Kempe, Bryans or Clayton. Crowdsourcing is attempting to work out which works are theirs by finding the reuse of cartoons in unidentified windows.

Memorial plaques, brasses, and marble tombs are another source of research. By collecting together examples one can see that for examples church brass memorials were produced in three London workshops. By the 16th century these memorials were being partly used for dynastic purposes as they included representations of the deceased's children (weepers/mourners), usually dressed according to their station in society. Some are dressed in swaddling bands indicative that they died within the first month of birth, others stand on plinths, the meaning of which is unknown, but there is some indication that it might mean that the child had died later in life. Then of course there is the clothes that these figures wear which would be contemporary to the age of the monument.

I think that where crowdsourcing is useful, is in collecting the raw data, which subsequently experts can piece together into a cohesive whole. Commons tends to remove the context. I recall a discussion taking place on some historical re-enactment website about a tomb I'd taken detailed images of. The tomb dates from about 1380 and has 30 figures around the sides, apparently according to the website discussion "People didn't wear clothes like that until the 1450s".

[Poetlister]

Every single named asteroid has a Wikipedia article. Soon enough, asteroids the size of one's fist would have their own articles. Yes, there are more asteroids in the solar system than there are Twitter users or even Facebook users.

Even worse, given that a gas giant's rings are made up of very small satellites orbiting together, it would be bad if Wikipedia has an article on every piece of ice and/or rock that makes up the rings of each gas giant.

Fortunately, it is unlikely that there will e anything meaningful to say about any individual bit of a planet's ring in the foreseeable future. But no doubt, when the time comes you will be right. And didn't Jimbo say he'd be happy to see a BLP about every single living person (other than ex-WMF staff)?

[eagle]

And didn't Jimbo say he'd be happy to see a BLP about every single living person (other than ex-WMF staff)?

I certainly don't want to revive the deletionist/inclusionist debate, but I am still trying to figure all of this out after the 14 years of discussion. Perhaps someone can please help me.

The only reason why Wikipedia was successful as a start-up project was that it attracted a group of intelligent people who were interested in writing an encyclopedia. The group has never agreed on what an "encyclopedia" is or what is the best way to go about writing one.

The initial group, mostly Larry Sanger, came up with an initial set of rules that if carried out to their logical extreme make absolutely no sense. The rules have evolved with untold layers of complexity added to them. However, the rules were sufficient to keep people working productively together at least until about 2006.

The unexpected result was that enough editors produced enough usable content that the project attracted enough Google Juice to take off. So Wikipedia has measured success in terms of the number of articles and the number of edits that editors produce (rather than the quality of the articles) and the number of page views that those articles generate on the whole. That means that if Poetlister and I edit-war over an unnamed asteroid, the success metrics go up. Of course, anyone expert enough to care about that asteroid will be blocked or banned in order to reaffirm the political power of the non-expert insider group that runs the project.

The leaders who have emerged since about 2006 have generally worked in popular areas where they could become known. (For example, Military History, USRD or Pokémon or even non-content areas like new change patrol.)

While having an encyclopedia so extensive that there would be a BPL on every living person would avoid a fight over who is included or who is excluded, there are obvious quality control problems associated with such a project. I do not see how the current leadership, who is immersed in the overrepresented content culture, can ever solve the problem. The problem is not that certain areas are overrepresented now -- it is that the current leadership hopes that more areas will be filled with low-quality garbage in the future.

[eagle]

Crowdsourcing is attempting to work out which works are theirs by finding the reuse of cartoons in unidentified windows.

I assume this effort is on a non-WMF project. In general, European arts and crafts has not been "overrepresented" on Wikipedia.

Your comment points out that the WMF does not have a monopoly on meaningful volunteer opportunities to add to human knowledge and must compete for volunteers with some well-run serious projects.

[lilburne]

Crowdsourcing is attempting to work out which works are theirs by finding the reuse of cartoons in unidentified windows.

I assume this effort is on a non-WMF project. In general, European arts and crafts has not been "overrepresented" on Wikipedia.

Your comment points out that the WMF does not have a monopoly on meaningful volunteer opportunities to add to human knowledge and must compete for volunteers with some well-run serious projects.

A lot of it with images happens on flickr in the groups etc. Take the Encyclopedia of Life as an example, a photographer adds one of the CC licenses to the image, adds it to the EOL group and adds an appropriate machine tag to the image something like "taxonomy:binomial=Species name". The EoL then collect the images where experts confirm that the taxonomy is correct. When confirmed the image appears on the relevant EoL page. If the image is added to the flickr map then it will also get picked up by the teams that are recording species distributions. The EoL activity I believe relegated wikispecies to the wilderness as it were.

[EricBarbour]

Wikiproject Doctor Who is now tracking 4,161 articles and files.
It's still the most "important" TV show ever made, according to Wikipedia. Even has its own "Manual of Style".

After years of dragging behind, Wikiproject Star Trek is catching up, with 3,827 articles/files.
Meditate on this for a while, especially the deletion template.

[Johnny Au]

Wikiproject Doctor Who is now tracking 4,161 articles and files.
It's still the most "important" TV show ever made, according to Wikipedia. Even has its own "Manual of Style".

After years of dragging behind, Wikiproject Star Trek is catching up, with 3,827 articles/files.
Meditate on this for a while, especially the deletion template.

Almost 1% of the English Wikipedia consists of Doctor Who (and related, such as the BBC). Daleks must be a household name and that police booths are all time-travelling machines.

How many articles link to Doctor Who (and include Doctor Who itself as well)?

[Jim]

Almost 1% of the English Wikipedia consists of Doctor Who (and related, such as the BBC).

?
Are you saying you included anything related to the BBC in your count of things related to Doctor Who (almost 1%)?
That would seem rather like including everything by any French artist in a count of things related to Claude Monet.
Apologies if I've misunderstood, and your point was just that TV itself is over-represented, and Doctor Who even more so.

[Johnny Au]

Almost 1% of the English Wikipedia consists of Doctor Who (and related, such as the BBC).

?
Are you saying you included anything related to the BBC in your count of things related to Doctor Who (almost 1%)?
That would seem rather like including everything by any French artist in a count of things related to Claude Monet.
Apologies if I've misunderstood, and your point was just that TV itself is over-represented, and Doctor Who even more so.

That is my point exactly. Television, especially from the following four countries are grossly overrepresented: the United States (most so), the United Kingdom (second most so), Japan (third most so, mostly via anime), and Canada (not as much but still overrepresented).

[Poetlister]

Television, especially from the following four countries are grossly overrepresented: the United States (most so), the United Kingdom (second most so), Japan (third most so, mostly via anime), and Canada (not as much but still overrepresented).

Given the nature of Wikipedia editors, this is only to be expected. I assume that the USA has by far the most editors on English WP, followed by the UK. And of course they are constantly selling each other their programmes so each country is familiar with popular programmes from the other.

[Zoloft]

Indeed. I was an inveterate viewr of Steptoe and Son (T-H-L), and Till Death Us Do Part (T-H-L).

[Johnny Au]

How about snooker? It is the only sport to have its own manual of style and one of its players has a longer biography than many major political figures even.

[eagle]

How about snooker? It is the only sport to have its own manual of style and one of its players has a longer biography than many major political figures even.

Wikipedia:WikiProject Snooker (T-H-L) does not look very active. Two new people joined in 2013 and none in 2014. The project page has been edited 4 times in 2014, and the last project talk page discussion was in November 2013.

If WikiProject Snooker is going to revive, it should take a page from the Netball folks and start "a movement" to displace another sport (say, Women's Basketball or Wrestling) from the Olympic Programme.

There are zero articles here on women in snooker

I think the problem is that ladies snooker doesn't tend to be covered by reliable sources, and with the ladies game being amateur the WSA site doesn't cover it either. Also, we haven't tended to cover the amateur game at all on Wikipedia.

Another gender gap of Wikibias. (sigh)

[eagle]

Not only does Snooker hold a place in the Overrepresented Content Pantheon, but the last man standing in Wikiproject Snooker, User:Armbrust (T-C-L) fits the profile to a t, according to his own user page:
a 29-year old unmarried male.
Unemployed.
Started editing Wikipedia in 2008.
Total claimed edit count of 229,328+.
Overweight: 108 kg (238 lb; 17.0 st).
Has so little sense of privacy that he shares his real name and blood type on his Wikipedia User Page.

This user scored 64008 on the Wikipediholic test.

[Jim]

Yeah, but here's something to consider. Significance, especially in sport, is not global. en.wikipedia is.

When I was growing up, snooker was a hugely popular sport - I knew all the player names and styles. I watched it avidly with my grandpa on TV.

It was on TV all the time, and funnily enough, there's even a theory that its popularity surge in the 70s was due to the (then new) predominance of colour TV and how well the table shape and ball colours suited the format. (yes, I watched it in black and white - not every set we had was colour even 10 years later...)

There's also one of my favourite BBC commentator quotes of all time - "and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green" - see Ted Lowe (T-H-L) for the commentator who said that.

On the other hand, as far as I was concerned back then, baseball was Rounders (T-H-L) played by big boys with a long bat, and the World Series (T-H-L) confused the shit out of me, since nobody in the "World" was in it, save the yanks (as I saw it).

Perspective. It varies.

[thekohser]

Overweight: 108 kg (238 lb; 17.0 st).

Do you know his height? This is a perfect weight for a man 6' 11".