German branch of the Wikimedia Foundation is hosting a panel discussion on November 5th in Berlin to discuss Wikipedia’s deletion policy based on the notability guideline. The German Wikipedia has been under fire for the last few weeks for deleting an article on the organization MOGiS, a citizen’s initiative founded in April 2009 for “victims against Internet censorship” (Missbrauchsopfer gegen Internetsperren).
The entry was deemed “irrelevant” and removed by the administrators citing reasons from lacking of public interest, insufficient media coverage, to absence of reliable source. The decision triggered heavy criticisms from the Blogosphere, as well as the age-old inclusionism vs. deletionism debate. Whether or not power has been abused or discretion exercised is not the purpose of my post. However, I must say the idea of letting a selected few decide on what is notable or “worthy of notice” on my behalf seems to go against what made Wikipedia so well loved and special in the first place. In many ways it reminds me of the discussion on Net Neutrality. Should Internet Service Providers get to decide the notice-worthiness of all Web contents, and what’s worse, base that decision on how much money they’re being paid by content providers? Should they simply block websites they consider unnotable? Should they devote more Bandwidth and CPU power to Web services they think are more notable for you, the customer?
Another example: consider those fledgling projects that are still unknown on SourceForge. Now, would you want some relevancy police go through each of these projects and delete ones they think nobody would be interested in?
We already have the principle of Neutral Point of View, but I wonder if it’s possible to go one step further and establish a “Wiki Neutrality” principle, which basically says
All ideas and entities in the universe that can be verbalized and communicated are equally “notable” or “relevant”(are you beginning to hate that word yet?). The community is responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the content, and no one is to decide whether the said content is notable or relevant for anyone else. Each individual is capable of deciding for themselves whether or not they want to access certain information without any help from the relevancy police.
What this means is, if I want to start a religion called Psychodollargy and put an entry on Wikipedia, I’d like to be able to do so, even if nobody has ever heard of it or wants to know about it. What is “unnotable” today might just be “notable” tomorrow. What is the worst thing that could happen if that Psychodollargy entry is left on Wikipedia? It is not a book that you read from the beginning to the end. It’s a source of reference that people come to with specific information they want to know about. If they’ve never heard of a construct or want to know about it, chances are, they’re never going to come upon it anyway. And what if they do? What’s so wrong, so scary and so awful about learning something new? Besides, the content is freely editable by everyone that sees the necessity to. Had Galileo put an article called “Sun-centered Theory” on Wikipedia, wouldn’t it be a pity if his contemporaries simply deleted his entry for being “original” or “irrelevant”? So what if everyone wants to have an entry on Wikipedia for themselves? I LOVE THAT IDEA!
The Participation of the Wikipedia panel discussion is limited to persons with a confirmed registration only. Send your email to podium@wikimedia.de before November 3rd. Members of the press should write to catrin.schoneville@wikimedia.de
