What Wikipedia is not
“What Wikipedia is not” is one of the core policies of the project. It claims that Wikipedia is not paper, a dictionary, a publisher of original thought, a soapbox, a mirror, a link repository, a webhost, an indiscriminate collection of information, or a crystal ball, and that it’s not censored.
One point that isn’t listed there is that Wikipedia is not the place for a documentation of its own history, but perhaps it should be.
The redirect from “What Wikipedia is not” in the article namespace to the correct location in the project namespace was deleted last month. The deletion removes the early edits to that page. The edits in Wikipedia’s first year, 2001, by TOertel, Kragen, The Cunctator, and possibly others that the conversion script lost when Wikipedia was first placed on what is now known as MediaWiki, are now invisible on Wikipedia itself. The development of such a defining policy has been lost.
Is it a result of what MeatBallWiki calls NoRespectForHistory? Or is it actually adhering to the “What Wikipedia is not” policy? The policy states that “Wikipedia is first and foremost an online encyclopedia“. Keeping redirects to non-encyclopedic content in the article namespace could be seen as hindering the main goal of the project since they lead to broken links when other sites mirror only the main namespace’s content, and possibly lead to confusion between which part of Wikipedia is the encyclopedia and which part is the community.
I would have opposed the deletion in the past, but then I’ve also supported deletions of other content that “oldbies” saw as a important part of Wikipedia’s history, but now I’m somewhere in between not caring and thinking it might be for the best. The history isn’t exactly lost - it’s just removed from the encyclopedia. It’s still available in old database dumps, and everything before 2002 is available on nostalgia.wikipedia.org. So, perhaps it’s time to give up my bias towards keeping redirects and old page histories for reasons of historical value, and focus on whether the redirects listed for deletion are actually benefitting the encyclopedia.
I guess the researchers will just have to find other ways of uncovering the project’s past.
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Eric said,
August 10, 2006 at 1:58
You know, I saw the link on that questionable edit of the uncyclopedia article on en.wp, and then read your blog (I’m not one to read any blog, so take that as a compliment). This particular entry is interesting because we discussed it in person late Sunday night just outside Harkness Commons.
The discussion included the fact that a great deal of the history of wikipedia disappears into the ether, from IRC being transient to the loss of old edits from articles, and how future historians will only be able to learn a small bit about us due to the loss of these important parts of wikipedia history.
The writers, on the other hand, objected to the idea of logging IRC or keeping anything self-referential. It seems the majority of project contributors don’t see themselves as notable, certainly not to the future, and would rather everything about them, except their work, be lost to history.
james_uk said,
September 26, 2006 at 0:50
Why HISTORY should be deemed inappropriate escapes me. Instead of fading away (what do they have to hide?), all entries should be preserved. Server space is under $1 per GB. In this mold, the new millenium can reflect a new spirit: “Create, but do not Destroy”.