Commentary: Wickedpedia?

Evidently the Internet isn't as safe for anarchy as we thought. It's certainly not a safe haven for those who work and slave in the webcomics industry.

It seems that Wikipedia, that free-for-all of often wrong and just as often irrelevant disinformation has been deleting articles from their pages with no oversight. It also seems that they have recently turned their attention to the mass deletion of articles on various webcomics. Needless to say, this has got the yukmasters panties all waded-up – and they're fit to be drawn if not feathered.

We first heard about this festering brouhaha on Friday, when Storm Bear Williams reported on Town Called Dobson that the Wiki article about his strip was slated for deletion:

“Last year I stopped donating to Wikipedia due to their notability policy. Other than being vague, it allows 'admins' to delete entries at will and usually without cause, justification or accountability. When the community votes to keep an article, admins have in the past EDITED the voting to reflect their personal wishes. No joke. Last week, without warning, Town Called Dobson was selected for 'rapis deletion' for the reason of non-notability. Even though TCD has appeared in print, won awards, has over 300,000 hits in Google and has over 100,000 readers a day via its front page status on many leading blogs, it has been classified as non-notable.”

We, of course, were alarmed. Forget the 300,000 Google hits and the 100,000 daily readers. Town Called Dobson appears on the front page of Alternative Approaches. With our delusions of grandeur intact, we figure that if it appears here, that makes it notable, no questions asked. Besides, both of the people who read our site have told us that the strip is important to them. If that doesn't make it notable, what does?

Town Called Dobson isn't the only victim of the Web Comics Massacre. Nor is the purge restricted to Toon Town, as pointed-out last week on the site Blogunder Schlock:

“I believe that 'notability purges' are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors. They are the enemy. They are articulate, erudite, convinced of their moral and intellectual superiority, and need to have their proverbial pictures plastered on the walls of the proverbial post-office.”

This was posted on October 25th. On the 29th, Wikinews, the always wrong and always under researched Wiki-P news service reported on the story, identifying the source of the deletions as an editor with the screen name Dragonfiend. In the article, Rob Balder, creator of the strips Erfworld and PartiallyClips calls the Wiki folks “the politest bunch of book-burning assholes on the planet.” By Halloween, the story was even getting space on Slashdot – which isn't particularly good news for Wikipedia, since they're in the middle of a fund-raiser right now, and the Toon Town residents are calling for a financial boycott.

Earlier this year, Dragonfiend explained Wiki's notability clause to the website Broken Frontier:

"'Notability' concerns whether a topic has been noted by independent reputable sources. It is what we rely on to make sure that the topics we cover have enough written about them to help ensure that we can write an article with information that has been evaluated and fact-checked, information that comes from multiple points of view so that we can be neutral, and information that explains why a topic is of any importance."

Sounds good, doesn't it? That is, until you think too much about the “...to make sure that the topics we cover have enough written about them to help ensure that we can write an article with information that has been evaluated and fact-checked.” This would make sense if Wikipedia was known as a reliable source of information.

The truth is, there is not a journalist outside of Pravda and the National Enquirer that would ever use Wikipedia as a research source. Also, there is hardly a college professor anywhere who will accept a paper that lists the site as a source. Why? Because you can't depend on an iota of information on the site. The Wiki folks might say that they're something like 85% accurate. As a journalist, I can tell you that 85% accurate equates to 100% inaccurate as far as our ability to use the site for research goes, since we have no way of knowing what's truth and what's invented.

Which leads us to ask, why would you give money to Wikipedia in the first place? They serve absolutely no useful purpose. Their model is flawed. A community edited encyclopedia can only produce fact filled fiction. And they have the nerve to say that Town Called Dobson isn't notable.

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