Does an unworthy Wikipedia bio page somehow harm anybody (aside from the hosting cost itself)? Honest question - I don't see how.
On the flipside, does adding these pages do anything to increase visibility for these women? Honest question here as well, but again I don't see how it would. I would only end up on one of these if I specifically searched for it, which implies she was already known to me.
Really this seems like a no-op to me.
Maybe I can grant some tiny positive value in that if I have an interest in one of these women, I can now go get a tiny amount of additional information about them.
Yes. People add themselves for self promotion which is at worst useless bandwidth but sometimes in cases of fraud/deception. I have seen cranks add pages about themselves as if they are experts on a subject which they are definitely not. That is harmful because you can mislead people since part of the appeal is the effect this has on google search results and the authoritative appearance of Wikipedia can mislead people.
> Does an unworthy Wikipedia bio page somehow harm anybody (aside from the hosting cost itself)?
Wikipedia is a massive repository of information. The more useless, irrelevant information is added to it, the harder it becomes to find relevant information, and to manage the repository as a whole. It's a pretty simple concept.
I genuine do not understand this argument. The internet as a whole has this problem since you can have literally millions of low quality SEO crap pages all targeting the same subject, but Wikipedia itself will only every have a single page for each person/subject, which strongly limits the negative impacts of flooding. I'm really trying to find examples of how this would occur. The best I can come up with is increasing disambiguation pages for people with similar names, which isn't a big deal.
One negative impact is the administrative burden of moderating those pages. There are disputes, there is false information, intentional misinformation etc that 'editors' need to remove. The positive of having Muhammad Lee have a page on Wikipedia is I think less than this negative.
We already have social media profiles for non-notable people's life and accomplishments. That should be enough.
But spam emails are delivered to my inbox along with all my real mail, cluttering it up. Wikipedia entries are not pushed to my attention and do not clutter my experience. I don't experience them at all.
Yeah, and some people want to use wikipedia just because you want to use your emails. Some people want to read stories about people they care about, not some random doctorate that added themselves to wikipedia for the sake of self-promotion.
It's about valuing the user experience first and foremost.
Sooner or later you get down to billions of stub articles. I wrote a research paper once, it even got published in a fairly large journal. But I am not noteworthy and don't need an article on wikipedia. You need to have some lower bound to stop egomaniacs like me from writing our own 10k world biographies...
I don't really see how B's of stub articles hurt though. I don't even see them, if I'm not looking for them. Maybe if they share a name with a more note-worthy person, and then clutter search results for that person and cause confusion.
* Those pages have to be stored somewhere. They're all MB of space and they make DB tables longer and introduce other issues and generally clog up the rest of the site
* Those pages all have to be moderated (and who will moderate irrelevant pages), all open wikipedia to charges of copyright infringement, slander/liable and other issues
* Those pages distract from actual, useful pages. At best they actually distract from it, at worse they will actively contradict it
* It encourages people to edit wikipedia for the wrong reasons. We already have issues with politicians and CEOs editing wikipedia for personal gain.
* Privacy. I am not notable. There should not be an article about me, even though I have published research. The last thing I want is an article about me I then have to either correct or leave incorrect, that pops up when you google me. I have more than enough social media already thanks, the last thing I want is an "account" where I am not even in charge of what it says...
* Lack of sources. If you let in 1000 small articles, you have to allow articles with few to no sources. If you do that, you will get important or popular articles being created also with no sources. Banning non-noteworthy articles also bans un-sourced articles.
Your premise is fundamentally wrong, you DO see stub articles you aren't searching for, that's actually the BIGGEST issue with them. If you have articles literally nobody wants to read on wikipedia, eventually quite a number of people are going to navigate to them accidentally over the years, and get annoyed. The more useless articles they are, the worse and worse this issue becomes, because you can only index and filter SO well.
The second issue is that if you scale the amount of articles without scaling the amount of editors you reduce the overall quality of the articles. Quality is ensured by having more editors relative to the amount of articles, removing standards to increase the number of articles relative to the number of editors invariably degrades quality, meaning even when somebody DOES find the right article it's inevitably going to be of lower quality.
Just mindlessly adding information without standards isn't helpful, or useful, it's hoarding and it's corrosive. It has nothing to do with maintaining a useful body of knowledge for people to reference, it's a problem maintainers of a body of knowledge have to fight an eternal and ultimately losing war against for as long as they can.
Because the credibility of articles on wikipedia rests on having multiple editors. Having one (likley biased) writer for billions of entries means that most of the info on wikipedia would be false. It's better to have less info and be more accurate than become a glorified ad space.
As somebody who has had a lot of interest in maintaining knowledge bases, yes it does, and the biggest problem is compromising search. It doesn't matter how good your approach to indexing is, there's no better approach to filtering out irrelevant rarely used information other than deleting it. Obscure entries in a knowledge base nobody cares about actually have a negative value.
A secondary negative effect is administrative and technical overhead. As knowledge bases expand and the number of editors stays about the same, the quality of any one entry in the knowledge base will tend to be worse since quite simply people are stretched thinner.
The primary motivation for including individuals here seems to be academic achievement. Worldwide there are tens of millions of people with doctorates and this number is growing rapidly. A large percent of these individuals would fulfill the standard set forth here.
At the time of this post the English language Wikipedia has 6,562,981 articles.
I'm on board with the more information side and am not a deletionist but this is an adversarial environment with few resources.
Essentially, for all us inclusionists, very few of us will actively help curate Wikipedia to remove spam.
This is why Blastoise is a safer topic than the Charles Reed Professor of Futurism at Salesforce University. There is no adversary who is attempting to promote Blastoise and consequently it is safer to include.
The greater the outside incentive to popularization, the less inclusionist we must be if we want to preserve a non-spam WP.
But maybe we don't want to do that. And to be honest, I don't know why not. Perhaps it's okay for Wikipedia to have an article on Rene Wiltord, a software engineer in the high frequency trading space, etc etc
Anyway, the few articles I sampled appear to be quite complete so I'm not going to hate. Ultimately, there's still lots of stuff not on Wikipedia so I feel positively about this.
If they were involved in discovering X, now they are much more like to be mentioned and linked in the article about X. So I think that would boost visibility slightly.
On the flipside, does adding these pages do anything to increase visibility for these women? Honest question here as well, but again I don't see how it would. I would only end up on one of these if I specifically searched for it, which implies she was already known to me.
Really this seems like a no-op to me.
Maybe I can grant some tiny positive value in that if I have an interest in one of these women, I can now go get a tiny amount of additional information about them.