The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump

Nicholson Baker wrote a review about a book about Wikipedia. While I haven’t read the book, the review itself it pretty good. You can read part of it here. In it, he writes about his crusade to keep articles from being deleted due to lack of relevance, citations, etc. He remarks how easy it is to get an article deleted, and how often it happens. Near the end, he mentions that someone has suggested a wikimorgue, or wikipedia for deleted wikipedia entires. (The term was coined by K.G. Schneider, aka the Free Range Librarian.) It turns out that someone has been working on a proto-version of just such a thing for almost a year and a half.

The Wikidumper is a blog dedicated to wikipedia articles marked for deletion. The site, run by Dr. Cliff Pickover is a simple way to ensure that these pages are not lost forever. Given the noble cause of the work, it is unfortunate that the method is so unsatisfactory.

The site is a blogspot blog, and while blogspot makes it very easy for almost anyone to start their own blog (something of a good thing), the simplicity of such a site makes a terrible place to gather this kind of information.

It seems obvious, but it probably needs to be said anyway: wikis are not blogs. While a blog can be a great place for an author or authors to post short notes or thoughts or articles for the public, it lacks the capability for collaboration and searchability that make wikis a good encyclopedia format. The website itself consists mainly of one giant webpage that includes every single entry selected to be placed in the Wikidumper for the past seventeen months. Searching doesn’t give one the option of searching in titles or within articles.

Furthermore, the selection process is unsatisfactory. According to the site, “If your entry is about to be deleted from Wikipedia and sent to an early grave, give us the link. I’ll give you a second chance and consider making the entry immortal.” So this depends upon users to send links to proposed deletions.

There is nothing here that distinguishes from pages that have been deleted and pages that survived on Wikipedia. Having the former here is redundant. Further, it is not clear how many entries are on Wikidumper. As of 3pm on March 25, 2008, there are 557 pages marked for possible deletion on Wikipedia. Pages are listed by the date the deletion was suggested, so it is very easy to keep up with new pages. Given this, it would be relatively easy to create a proper wikimorgue for these pages.

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If it can be agreed that a better solution is possible, perhaps the more important question would be, is such a solution necessary in the first place? As a student at a library school, I am going to skip most of the point-by-point explanation as to why it’s better to save than to delete. However, there are a couple of questions that I think don’t necessarily have simple answers.

I grant that one man’s trash is another’s treasure, I wonder what it says about the reputation of a resource that would allow any ten-year-old to post an article about themselves. Is it not better that Wikipedia require that there be some source that establishes the “importance” of the article?

Also, while Wikipedia claims to have an almost complete “bottom-up” structure, where anyone can create or edit articles, what does it mean that one of a select few editors can delete an article with almost no basis for doing so, besides a single complaint? (To be honest, this question is rigged. For more on how Wikipedia isn’t really a perfect bottom-up structure, see this Kevin Kelly article.)

Altogether, I would consider myself an inclusionist, and therefore think that the Wikidumper is a passable first step. Now what we need is a proper wikimorgue for this endeavor...