[clug] Wikipedia and Deletionism

[Ivan Miljenovic]

On 25 March 2010 14:29, Craig Small <csmall at enc.com.au> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 09:43:09AM +1100, Ivan Miljenovic wrote:
>> The rationale is probably to do with the latest DWM deletion debate
>> (that is, open source projects' wikipedia pages get deleted because
>> they are not "notable" in the sense that the average Joe Blow hasn't
>> heard of them).
> Is DWM desktop Window Manager?

Nope: Dynamic Window Manager: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwm

> Just imagine how much space they'd save if they deleted non-"notable"
> information off wikipedia.  While there is a lot of useful information
> there is a lot that isn't useful.

Define "non-notable": I personally don't think the latest hijinks of
some actress notable whereas others might (vehemently) disagree.

> The whole needs third-party references push seems completely wrong to me
> too.  For objective statements primary sources would seem to be the best
> place to get information.

For a lot of people (myself included) it can be hard to find
information about some software projects as their home pages don't
always offer the kind of overview information someone who has never
heard of it before might want to know about.  As such, Wikipedia is
(used to be?) a good source of such information.  Even something like
programming languages: Wikipedia typically has decent "condensed"
information about what's unique/novel about a programming language,
some samples, how it compares to other languages, etc. which home
pages typically don't (or at least not found as conveniently,
including the "influenced/influenced by" information).

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com