Aaron and Wikipedia

Aaron Swartz of RSS fame is cur­rently hav­ing a rather heated debate on Wikipedia regard­ing their dele­tion poli­cies pos­si­bly due to a page he con­tributed the extreme major­ity to which is now being con­sid­ered for dele­tion, List of left-wing orga­ni­za­tions in the USA. There is a wikipedia-thread about the topic. He seems to be of the opin­ion that pages should not be deleted, that there is no rea­son for them to be, they should only be blanked and the sys­tem should inter­pret that as there being no page there. (medi­awiki, the soft­ware wikipedia uses, styles links to non-existant pages dif­fer­ently). He also thinks that instead of pro­tect­ing a page dur­ing an edit war the users that join the edit war should be pun­ished some­how, prob­a­bly tem­po­rary banning.

This con­cept for delet­ing pages has been dis­cussed, Pure wiki dele­tion sys­tem (pro­posal) and I gen­er­ally think it is a good sys­tem for small wikis. I am unsure how it would scale to wikipedia, there are up to 10 new pages cre­ated every few min­utes, and peo­ple who delete them nearly con­stantly. Many of the pages are non­sense. The major­ity of new pages cre­ated are can­di­dates for speedy dele­tion, and are thusly deleted. Hav­ing the hard­ware store all these pages for­ever because we can’t delete things because it some­times makes peo­ple mad seems like a poor decision.

The real debates hap­pen in another area, meant for pages that prob­a­bly don’t belong, but are not obvi­ous non­sense, this is where the List of left-wing orga­ni­za­tions in the USA found itself. I think this con­tro­versy stems from a mis­un­der­stand­ing about the cul­ture of wikipedia. They have com­mu­nity stan­dards, and value con­sen­sus a great deal. In many respects it is dif­fer­ent from most wikis where any infor­ma­tion is val­ued, some data being bet­ter than oth­ers, but all worth­while with the ideal of open infor­ma­tion. Wikipedia, bal­ances this com­mon net view of as-much-info-as-possible with some other ideals that it sets higher. Neu­tral­ity, nota­bil­ity, valid­ity, con­sen­sus are all more impor­tant to wikipedi­ans. It is accepted prac­tice to delete non-neutral parts of arti­cles if they are not sal­vagable, and arti­cles whose nota­bil­ity is ques­tioned will have that nota­bil­ity dis­cussed with the dele­tion of the arti­cle as a pos­si­ble outcome.

These ideals wikipedia sets up for itself are impor­tant for it to be trusted, and for it to be a non-partisan neu­tral source of infor­ma­tion. I do not think these ideals are applic­a­ble or ben­e­fi­cial for the wider inter­net, but they are for the goals that wikipedia sets up for itself.