Where do Wikipedia pages go to die? To the Deletionpedia, of course, a 60,000+ article archive of material that did not live up to Wikipedia's high standards. Even the Wikipedia entry for Deletionpedia was in danger of deletion.
Actually, forget what I said a moment ago about high standards; Wikipedia is the sort of site where even Jimbo Wales can't stand his own entry. "It pains me very much when I go to a conference and someone introduces me by reading from it," he told the Wall Street Journal this summer.
The Journal piece, by noted science writer James Gleick, gives a nice overview of the factionalism and ideological differences that have turned Wikipedia editing into a full-contact sport. One of the many debates raging in the wikisphere concerns the limits of triviality: a list of minor Star Wars bounty hunters was axed, for instance, while a complete list of Jetsons episodes persists as a service to the world.
As the battle between deletionists and inclusionists leaves the corpses of battered articles scattered about the site, a bot grabs deleted articles and archives them for all to see on Deletionpedia. If you're the sort of person who cries "censorship!" when a "list of films with monkeys in them" gets deleted for being "unmanageable listcruft," worry no more.
The site is a fascinating reference work to the kind of material that even Wikipedia, a site that hosts 200 lists of animated TV show episodes, deems too obscure to be worthy. The shockingly long "Weapons of the Imperium (Warhammer 40,000)" was finally deleted on July 9, 2008, for instance, after being up on Wikipedia for 893 days.
3D chainsword model, you
are not wanted at Wikipedia
After coverage of Deletionpedia this week from The Industry Standard and Slashdot, the "Deletionpedia" entry on Wikipedia was actually considered for deletion, though it was eventually saved. Phew!
Plenty of user-generated content simply isn't very good, or doesn't fall within established parameters, or violates copyright, or does something else that gets it yanked from the sites that host such material, but sites like Deletionpedia and Delutube (now down) have sprung up to archive the deletions.
This is the web's archival impulse at work—"Who knows what might be lost to the world if we lose anything? And besides, storage is cheap!" But human history has been a record of such losses, most information slipping through the cracks of time and into the void; the human body is the same, at any given moment filtering out the majority of external stimuli in order to provide us that great gift of concentration, focus, attention itself.
By archiving everything they can, from building codes to law opinions to web sites to deleted Wikipedia entries, such sites are part of a new, "never lose it" approach to information collection. Certainly this has tremendous benefits, but in terms of sheer information overload, does it also have costs?
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