D&D Modules on Wikipedia

[Blair Goatsblood]

.... The general rule of thumb on Wikipedia with regards to articles about bands is that they have to have made at least one song or album that placed somewhere on a major sales chart (or some other equivalent sign of success/fame/notability). If you haven't even ever placed anywhere on a chart, you probably haven't been very notable in the music world. .....

That seem's overly conservative to me.

 

[Robbastard]

I suggest that every time an article is tagged or nominated, those wishing to preserve the article copy & paste it to the nominator/tagger's user page with a redirect. That way, we preserve the article while at the same time removing it from the main part of the wiki. This will also give the nominator a chance to improve it, & possibly discourage them from their dickery.

And the great thing about Wikipedia is ANYONE can do this--you don't need to register or anything! Several of the game-related nominations can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Deletion_sorting/Game-related , most of them courtesy of Userilotbob or User:Gavin.collins.

 

[Thurbane]

That seem's overly conservative to me.

I agree. I would imagine over 75% of the music I listen to (industrial, punk, metal, goth) would NEVER have placed in a mainstream chart.

Does that mean bands like The EverDead, Cancerslug and Santa Hates You have no place in Wiki? Sad...call me an advocate for freedom of information over intellectual elitism then...

 

[Gez]

The webcomic crowd has had to deal with deletionism too. There's a good summary of the whole deal on Slashdot:

"Howard Tayler, the webcomic artist of Schlock Mercenary fame, is calling on people not to donate money during the latest Wikimedia Foundation fund-raiser. This is to protest the 'notability purges' taking place throughout Wikipedia, where articles are being removed en-masse by what many see as overzealous admins. The webcomic community in particular has long felt slighted by the application of Wikipedia's contentious Notability policy. Wikinews reporters have recently begun investigating this issue, but are the admins listening?"​

 

[jeffh]

It's not a "space" problem, it's a "resource" problem. And by "resource," I mean "editors who aren't hacks."

The people who think that every band, book, cheap fanzine, crappy website, and local celebrity need Wikipedia entries are mostly drive-by hacks. They create a crappy entry about a couple of things, then disappear until somebody tries to delete it, and then whine about how Wikipedia should include everything in the world. Those people aren't really helping anybody -- they're wasting the time of people who cold be working on entries that actually worth reading.

You know what "non-notable" really means? It means "this entry isn't worth the time of a competent editor." Encyclopedia entries can't just be created, they have to maintained. The notability standards are there to keep Wikipedia from filling up with so much childish crap that the grown-ups can't mantain it. Pages about non-notable subjects usually turn into poorly-cited, overly-editorialized, marketing-dominated crap, because nobody has the time to maintain all the non-notable pages.

There's a lot of childish crap in the roleplaying entries, actually. Poorly-cited regurgitations of WOTC books, short-and-pointless entries about monster manuals that do nothing but list the monsters, and a lot stolen clip art (I had to help remove all that, actually, before I quit Wikipedia). The roleplaying articles in Wikipedia are actually some of the worst there. Being published by WOTC doesn't automatically make something important, guys.

People who think an encyclopedia is supposed to include everything in the world don't get it. That's creating an encyclopedia that lacks quality control because it's too big to be managed.

You make some valid points (though I don't think anyone else is actually disagreeing with most of them) about what does and does not belong in Wikipedia, but as far as I can see, none of them have any bearing on the justifiability of the notability guidelines.

Your arguments are arguments against bad articles, not against articles on local bands, fanzines or minor D&D modules. It is easy to imagine, and I'm sure has in some cases actually happened, that an article on one of these subjects be written without editorializing or juvenilia. There are other rules, such as the neutrality guidelines, that address the problems you mention; the notability rules are not what's actually doing the work in any of your examples. And it's not clear to me why anyone would expect them to. If you want to keep out low-quality articles, make and enforce rules about low-quality articles, not blanket prohibitions on certain types of content. Go after your real target, not something orthogonal to it.

(Similar comments apply to my own least favourite Wikipedia rule, No Original Research, and it seems to me the two work, or rather fail to, hand-in-hand in the cases being complained about here.)

 

[jeffh]

Wow, what a jerk. I hope he at least announces this rule in class, but even at that, failing a paper for a single mistake...

Even Wikipedia itself urges readers not to cite it in papers and the like. In this, it is no different from any other general-purpose encyclopedia; you don't, past about grade six, cite Britannica in this way either. Wikipedia is on the whole neither better nor worse for this purpose; as you sort of go on to say, you might use it as a starting point but it's just not the sort of thing you should cite in anything like a serious academic context. I have no idea why anyone would expect or even want it to be.

 

[Eosin the Red]

It's basically just one deletionist being a douchebag and undoing everyone's work in the misguided opinion that he is helping Wikipedia.

The site is, unfortunately, swarming with ass-faces like this guy, and there's basically no reasoning with them.

I have pretty much given up on it, because while mofo can spend every day on Wikipedia nominating stuff for deletion and adding inappropriate templates that question the notiblity of all D&D-related pages, I don't have the time or energy to fight him on it.

So dicks win. Again.

I want to bronze that whole statement.

 

[Kesh]

Your arguments are arguments against bad articles, not against articles on local bands, fanzines or minor D&D modules.

The local bands and fanzines tend to be the major source of bad articles on Wikipedia. They're used to advertise, not provide relevant info. That's one of the reasons for such stringent notability rules, the sheer abuse of Wikipedia for self-promotion.

(Similar comments apply to my own least favourite Wikipedia rule, No Original Research, and it seems to me the two work, or rather fail to, hand-in-hand in the cases being complained about here.)

NOR goes hand-in-hand with the Verifiability policy: if it's original material, there's no independent third-party sources we can source for the article. It's all your work and, until someone else writes a paper/article/review, Wikipedia can't do anything but basically put up an advertisement for your idea. Folks doing original research need to be putting up their own websites or submitting to peer-reviewed journals, not trying to self-promote on Wikipedia.

 

[prosfilaes]

Even Wikipedia itself urges readers not to cite it in papers and the like. In this, it is no different from any other general-purpose encyclopedia; you don't, past about grade six, cite Britannica in this way either.

I'm not saying that you should cite Wikipedia; I'm saying that marking a paper an F based on citing Wikipedia (and not, note, Britannica, so it is different) is completely out of proportion to the error. A good paper should never be failed because of one mistake; a good paper marred by mistakes should be marked down to an amount relative to the mistakes. If you want to dock a letter grade, fine. More if much of the paper was just cited to Wikipedia. Yeah, I might fail it if it only cited Wikipedia. But that's proportional, not a knee-jerk reaction.

 

[prosfilaes]

(Similar comments apply to my own least favourite Wikipedia rule, No Original Research, and it seems to me the two work, or rather fail to, hand-in-hand in the cases being complained about here.)

NOR is essential to being an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are secondary sources, not original ones. It also keeps the reliability of Wikipedia up; anyone can check to see whether or not Nature really did publish an article on the extraordinary flatulence of guinea pigs, and if they did it was because some professional editors and scientists looked over the results. If Prosfilaes writes that he has done the studies and found that, what reason do you have to believe him? How can you disprove him without redoing the studies yourself?

It also makes editing a lot easier. You don't have to argue against "Gary Gygax is merely a mask of Satan"; you invoke NOR and go on. For a deeper example, the theory that "the [[De Havilland Comet]] crashes (i.e. BOAC Flight 781) were caused by German bombs" was rejected because of NOR. The nominator of that idea made lots of arguments on the talk page, but is Wikipedia better served by reprinting the well-established cause of the crash, or by trying to have people who earned their degrees in Aeronautical Engineering from the TV show "Air Crash Investigations" vet and publish a new theory of the crashes?

I do think there's a lot of people who are too quick to delete articles, but I also don't think Wikipedia is served by tons of tiny, hard to reference articles. Where's the value in merely repeating large sections of the Monster Manual or the DMG? I think there should be a wiki for all the dieties and atifacts and whatever in D&D, and keep the encyclopedic material in Wikipedia, the material that goes beyond just repeating the books.