In Defense of Inclusionism (2009-18) - <AUTHOR> https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism <comment><USER2> As a purely end-user of Wikipedia I just want to chip in only to say that I have not seen any observable decline in Wikipedia over the last 15 years. I am generally very happy with the results I get when I use it.

> The fundamental cause of the decline is the English Wikipedia's increasingly > narrow attitude as to what are acceptable topics and to what depth those > topics can be explored, combined with a narrowed attitude as to what are > acceptable sources, where academic & media coverage trumps any consideration > of other factors.

I guess it sucks for people who wanted to write articles on each chapter of Atlas Shrugged or thought Bulbasaur needed his own page. Presumably, though, you agree there should be SOME criteria for what is notable enough to deserve a Wikipedia article? For example, in order of increasing mundanity these topics probably don't deserve a Wikipedia article: Me, my cat, my cat's water bowl, the water in the bowl on May 5, 2020 etc.

Like, there must be some line that separates what deserves an article and what is does not. We can argue about where to draw that line but I'm actually pretty happy with how Wikipedia has done it.

<comment><USER3> > these topics probably don't deserve a Wikipedia article: Me, my cat, my > cat's water bowl, the water in the bowl on May 5, 2020 etc.

Yes, they probably don't. But what is the cost of having them? If they confuse an issue, like if your cat shares a name with a more notable animal, then yours can just be renamed to "Fluffers (Permit's cat)". Who does it hurt to have that page on there, even in the reductio ad absurdum? Even, hypothetically, storage costs -- in the current deletionist world, the initial article and its deletion will be preserved in history forever, so we don't save anything.

If we need to provide the capability to flag pages as "deletionists don't like this" and present a deletionist view of wikipedia to those who don't wish to be exposed to that content, then go for it.

I don't mean to try to throw rhetorical exclamation points everywhere; I'm genuinely curious about the cost of having a page about your cat's water bowl.

<comment><USER4> Wikipedians have been arguing over these positions for many years, so if you want to see the arguments in favor of deletionism, there are plenty of places to look.

For example, here are IMO the most salient points from [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism):

> Some believe that the presence of uninformative articles damage the > project's usefulness and credibility, particularly when casual visitors > encounter them through Internet search engines or Wikipedia's "random page" > or "recent changes."

> Articles on obscure topics, even if they are in principle verifiable, tend > to be very difficult to verify. Usually, the more obscure, the harder to > verify. Actually verifying such articles, or sorting out verifiable facts > from exaggeration and fiction, takes a great deal of time. Not verifying > them opens the door to fiction and advertising. This also leads to a de > facto collapse of the "no original research policy", which is one of the > fundamental Wikipedia policies. Empirically, there have been a number of > hoax articles which were difficult to prove to be hoaxes but which could > have easily been deleted by a sufficiently strict notability policy.

> Poorly-sourced articles can result in Citogenesis, as incorrect or unsourced > information on Wiki (e.g., information that is the product of original > research) is then repeated outside Wiki and eventually works its way into a > publication that is normally regarded as a reliable source.

<comment><USER5> When you hit random page, most of the time you get one of the following:

Uninformative article about a locality

Uninformative article about the football team of the above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As an inclusionist who has basically given up on editing wikipedia because of deletionist forces, I read this article and see nothing but points I agree with.

What I would like to see, however, is a good defense of deletionism. I have a lot of trouble even understanding the point of view.

If there's some higher-level motivation about storage costs or something, then I can buy it, but I don't think anyone is making that argument. Does it hurt wikipedia to have low-quality articles? I think only insofar as the articles are about subjects that are important, so the effect seems to be self- balancing. Can wikipedia be used by people to glorify themselves with personal wikipedia pages? Sure, but who cares -- unless someone does care in a particular instance (i.e. a person named Albert Einstein tries to take over the main article -- people will fight it because they want the article to point to the right person).

<comment><USER6> The argument for deletionism is straightforward: the scarcest resource on Wikipedia --- and this article agrees! --- is volunteer time. Every article on WP is a drag on volunteer time, because every article needs to be policed for spam and vandalism. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a Hitchhiker's Guide, so scoping it to encyclopedic topics reserves volunteer time for meaningful tasks.

 _later_

If you want to come at this from the vantage point of principles: one of the oldest rules on Wikipedia is "No Original Research" (an encyclopedia is a tertiary source). Articles on non-notable subjects are almost by definition original research.

<comment><USER3> This is one of the few responses I've seen that actually articulates a defense of deletionism rather than just a summary of deletionist theory, so let me engage here.

What exactly does policing for spam and vandalism consist of? There are a number of automated tools already deployed on wikipedia that get improved over time for detecting particular types of spam and vandalism. The use of anonymous accounts, in particular, make it hard to do any interesting spam at scale. It seems to me that the larger wikipedia is, paradoxically, the easier it will be to detect patterns of spam, especially out on the tail.

As for "No Original Research", that's probably the principle of wikipedia that I'm most skeptical of; and really, it isn't respected, as wikipedia has become such an important secondary source. I think it's useful as a guiding principle, in that you don't want people using wikipedia as a platform to advance their alternative theory of gravity, but for the most part the harm is small to allow us to push the envelope a little bit.

<comment><USER6> Policing spam and vandalism entails reading all the changes to pages you're policing. That's why WP editors have watchlists, because no one person can keep context for all the pages on the site in their head. A lot of spam detection is automated, but a lot of spam isn't automated: it's people with a fairly decent understanding of a topic surreptitiously editing its page to give it a preferred spin (or promotion). The whole premise of Wikipedia is that not being allowed to stand.

As regards "no OR isn't a problem": if your feeling is that the project is rife with OR, you should have no problem generating links to 5 pages that demonstrate the phenomenon. Let's discuss specifics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A thread from 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13152255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13152255)

Thread from 2014 - interesting top comment there: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791791)

(Reposts are ok after about a year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html))

I've made the year in the title a gwernian range.

</comment><comment><USER8> "The fundamental cause of the decline is the English Wikipedia's increasingly narrow attitude as to what are acceptable topics and .. what are acceptable sources, where academic & media coverage trumps any consideration of other factors."

.. as well as self-serving corporate and political interests. As in they sit on an article 24/7 making sure nothing controversial get in.

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."

Except for those that contradict the inner party. Go to the Talk Page and discuss it they say. Do that and your account gets disabled for violating some obscure WP rule.

</comment><comment><USER9> No comments yet? I guess others are still reading TFA...

There are a number of issues that seem to be eternal. Even if there's an obvious right answer, I see year after year, decade after decade that they keep being discussed, with the same points being made over and over again. Is there a name for these?

I guess that for each of them, there is some kind of unspeakable reason that trumps any sound rationale.

<comment><USER10> _> I guess that for each of them, there is some kind of unspeakable reason that trumps any sound rationale._

I think the general unspeakable reason is pretty simple: once you give people power, some of them will misuse it. And since it takes more effort to correct a misuse of power than to commit the misuse in the first place, any institution that gives people power becomes more and more corrupt over time as misuses of power outweigh valid uses of power.

<comment><USER11> The nice thing about Wikis in general is that it's usually easier to correct a misuse of the power to edit a page than it is to commit the misuse in the first place. That's why Wikis work at all.

<comment><USER9> That works for the power to edit, not for the power to delete. So it makes sense, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I noticed the decline. About a year ago, during a hackathon, we tried to get an article online. It took us 3 deletes and retries. Then I reached out to a national official at Wikipedia and finally the article got accepted. That's not good...

<comment><USER6> What was the article? It'll have a history, and we can see for ourselves what happened with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Same goes for stackoverflow.

Since the stackoverflow database is freely available I cannot see a single good reason why they haven't been outcompeted years ago.

<comment><USER14> So I have my own beefs with stackoverflow and the stackexchange network at large, but...

...at some point you have to ask yourself, _why_ haven't they been outcompeted? For every post complaining about stackoverflow moderation or policies, there are probably thousands of people using it every day to do their jobs, and _it hasn 't been outcompeted_!

So if we're honest, we cannot rule out the possibility they are doing something right. They set out to replace closed sites like "Expert Sex Change" \-- ok, sorry for the joke, expertsexchange -- and also reduce low quality noise. They succeeded and they are now the gold standard. So why hasn't anyone simply taken their data and forked it?

A great example: softwareengineering.stackexchange -- formerly programmers.stackexchange -- has a troubled history. At times it has decided _everything_ was off-topic there (I'm not joking, there were times where every question on the home page was closed as off-topic), and some long time "inclusionist" and well-intentioned contributors declared they would fork it, and their fork would include everything even tangentially related to programmers and people wouldn't be censored for asking questions about anything.

Where are those forks now?

<comment><USER15> First mover advantage. It's like asking why no one has created another Reddit, or another HN. When the original exists, a derivative doesn't gain traction unless something goes seriously wrong.

The sole time that Reddit was in danger was when their front page was blacked out over the moderator rebellion. Luckily for them, Voat's servers completely died under the load. Then Reddit came back online, and the rest was history.

I would imagine your questions have straightforward answers along those lines. No one switches because inertia, not quality.

In general, a new thing has to be fundamentally different in some way. It's rare that an internet product is out-competed by someone else doing literally the same thing. Even Reddit was fundamentally different from digg. They were both link aggregators, but that's about where the similarities stopped.

<comment><USER14> Agreed about the first mover advantage.

Do note StackOverflow is only _relatively_ a first mover: expertsexchange came _first_ , and StackOverflow killed it. Evidently, they did something better.

Wikipedia also had challengers. I don't remember their names (heh) but many years ago there were forks. I don't mean Wikia, but actual alternatives to Wikipedia. Nobody uses them.

> _In general, a new thing has to be fundamentally different in some way. It > 's rare that an internet product is out-competed by someone else doing > literally the same thing._

Possibly right, too! But if an inclusionist attitude is not something "fundamentally different" enough to succeed, then might it be that it wasn't important enough to say that deletionism is killing Wikipedia/StackOverflow? If people don't flock to inclusivist forks, maybe inclusivism isn't important enough?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This sort of problem (or its opposite) is inevitable with our internet circa 2020.

Maybe wikipedia _is_ too narrow. Maybe it's too broad. These things don't have singular, indisputable answers...

The problem is that we have an internet of bottlenecks. Wikipedia choices about what is encyclopedic or notable is the only definition of encyclopedic that matters. Youtube's interpretation of fair use, twitter's definition of offensive or facebook's definition of obscene... they're the working definitions.

The internet needs to be less centralised... Even wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER17> If Wikipedia is to retain a deletionist editorial cultural, I'd at least like to be able to access the history for deleted entries and read old versions of such entries. As it stands, those entries seem to be permanently removed from public access (and maybe even on the back end.) I don't like that 1984-style versioning, which gives the message that certain entries never existed in the first place.

(I'd understand a small exception for copyright infringing content--that such content should remain unavailable when deleted.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone here remember Seth Finkelstein?

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jul/31/wikipedia](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jul/31/wikipedia)

I miss his writing!

edit: His blog is still up: [http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/cat_wikipedia.htm...](http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/cat_wikipedia.html) but unfortunately, no new entries since 2013 :(

</comment><comment><USER19> I have to say this is spot on. The move of things like the Culture spacecraft names into wikia was a killing blow, particularly due to the use of ... dubious... cookies and tracking on wikia.

And while i understand the feeling this does not belong in wikipedia, this was not wrong either or low quality and a good open door for new editors. I could keep going, i have a long list of lost good information from wikipedia over the years. This one is just the one that made me decide to stop using it.

</comment><comment><USER20> > If you try to write niche articles on certain topics, people will tell you > to save it for Wikia. I am not excited or interested in such a parochial > project which excludes so many of my interests, which does not want me to go > into great depth about even the interests it deems meritorious—and a great > many other people are not excited either, especially as they begin to > realize that even if you navigate the culture correctly and get your > material into Wikipedia, there is far from any guarantee that your > contributions will be respected, not deleted, and improved.

I hate to be seen as supporting deletionism, because I've never contributed enough to WP to really have an opinion (I've mostly just expanded on existing articles and fixed obvious vandalism and typos), but I don't understand why this is a bad thing.

I don't like that they're being driven to an ad-supported website, but the simple act of not having Wikipedia eat all of the web seems like a good thing. The Iron Law of Oligarchy will weaken the website just like it's destroyed every other website, with no good reason to believe it'll be different this time. At least if Wikipedia is limited in scope, the damage it does will be limited too.

<comment><USER21> > I don't like that they're being driven to an ad-supported website, but the > simple act of not having Wikipedia eat all of the web seems like a good > thing.

No, having all of this content under Wikipedia would be an amazing thing. For all its warts, Wikipedia (When it has the information you are looking for) is the gold standard in what the the web _should_ be. It's amazing that it exists as a website, and compared to the mountains of crud that surrounds it, it has an amazing UX.

The inclusionist argument is that the web would be better if more of its content was available under the same high standards that Wikipedia set.

Competitors can't deliver that same standard because of economies of scale.

<comment><USER20> > Competitors can't deliver that same standard because of economies of scale.

The invasion of policy-driven jerks seems like a good counterargument; it's an anti-economy of scale, since smaller websites have less of the problem.

edit: Arguing about scale also kind of ignores that there's a good space between the scope of the website being "everything" and having a website dedicated to the IDW "Sniffles the Mouse" comics. IMDB is well-respected, TVTropes has been successful with a very different culture from IMDB, the Arch Linux Wiki has a reputation for being useful even if you aren't technically using Arch, and, as we've already proven, Wikia has pretty much made a business out of this.

<comment><USER21> Smaller websites have this problem, it's just that the holy wars waged within the Pokemon fandom rarely make it to the HN front page. If anything, the politics get even more personal and vicious in smaller communities.

The business of Wikia may be successful, but as a user, it's complete rubbish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Most of the important topics were covered years ago. Encyclopedias are not high-maintenance; the maintenance team for Britannica wasn't all that big.

I used to edit Wikipedia quite a bit, but got into other things.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is it easy to tell what technology gwern uses for his website? I'm not web- savvy, but it looks html looks like it's not generated, but hand crafted. Is is a static website?

<comment><USER24> As Juped said, there is actually an in depth discussion of the tool used to generate the website on the about page: [https://www.gwern.net/About#tools](https://www.gwern.net/About#tools) It looks like static generated website is about correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > fundamental cause of the decline is the English Wikipedia's increasingly > narrow attitude as to what are acceptable topics and to what depth those > topics can be explored, combined with a narrowed attitude as to what are > acceptable sources, where academic & media coverage trumps any consideration > of other factors.

This is a result of the state/traditional media asserting more control over internet propaganda. Year by year, what is acceptable on wikipedia, forums, social media, etc have narrowed. Followed by the strong arming of these tech companies into privileging authoritarian/authoritative sources.

Look at what happened to youtube. There was a time when they had great recommendations and you could go into a "deep dive" of youtube for hours. Now, the recommendations has no depth and focused on "late night shows", establishment news and pre-screened content. Google search is no better. Reddit is just advertisement/pr ( celebrity X donated 5 masks to a hospital ) garbage and propaganda.

It's pretty impressive how easily and quickly a handful of "bankrupt" news companies could control trillion dollar tech companies. What you could write, say, etc and what you could watch, hear, etc has been limited in just few years. And the trend doesn't seem to be stopping. Just 10 years ago, nobody could've predicted this could happen.

</comment><comment><USER26> Gwern's website starts to be next level.</comment>


Unreal Engine 4 on OpenPOWER - <AUTHOR> https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/op_ue4_gl.php <comment><USER2> Nice. There was an Anandech article here not too long ago showing pretty nice improvement over Intel in some cases:

\---

All in all, the maximum throughput of one POWER8 core is about 43% faster than a similar Broadwell-based Xeon E5 v4. Considering that using more cores hardly ever results in perfect scaling, a POWER8 CPU should be able to keep up with a Xeon with 40 to 60% more cores.

\---

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/10435/assessing-ibms- power8-pa...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/10435/assessing-ibms- power8-part-1/11)

<comment><USER3> Big thing to also take from that article is that the POWER8 uses over 2 times as much power as the Xeon E5 v4. Depending on the use case this can be very important.

<comment><USER4> If single-threaded performance or memory bandwidth is more important to your use case then POWER8 would steamroll a Xeon E5 v4 even factoring in the power usage, I'm actually looking at trying to get a S812LC at work to eval moving one of our very heavy transactional PostgreSQL databases to for this very reason (having to run a seq scan over a 80GB table would benefit heavily from the increased memory bandwidth).

<comment><USER5> As per article linked by the OP, the single threaded performance of the POWER8 is 87% of the Intel CPU at the same clock [1].

The per-core performance is higher thanks to the 8 thread SMT capability of POWER8 (although the sweet spot is normally 4) and its massive 8-way execution. So POWER8 is excellent for heavily threaded applications, but for pure single thread speed, Intel is still king.

[1] IIRC POWER8 and Intel CPUs peak at around the same clock speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Back when I worked on a UE3 title we actually used machines not too far off(basically more RAM) from final specs so that we wouldn't build things that could never be run on a reasonable PC/X360/etc. Giving a developer a machine close to an end users definitely incentivises a focus on fast, performant code.

However having faster asset cooking is always a good thing.

<comment><USER7> Faster build machines should always available to devs. Machines to test on should be the average of the end users.

<comment><USER6> Yup, we'd use IncrediBuild to keep build times down to something reasonable.

Unless you're working on something very console specific most of your day to day testing happens on PC. Even titles that don't have a PC port will have a PC version of the game since iteration time is so much quicker. Having something close in specs there means you'll see perf issues right up-front as opposed to when QA gets around to testing it the next day.

<comment><USER8> I recently worked on a AAA port where we had roughly 220Ghz worth of processing power hooked on IncrediBuild; a full rebuild still took about 15 minutes!

We had to make the engine sit on the PSVita and for that reason did all the development, debugging and testing on that platform. We even debugged a release build most of the time because the debug one wouldn't go above 5fps!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _> OpenPOWER systems allow you to keep your valuable assets and proprietary engine code safe and secure through full owner control_

What does it mean? It's some form of DRM pitch?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. It's about not having anything like Intel's ME running code you can't audit or control that has full access to your hardware. It's basically the same pitch as for Libreboot [https://libreboot.org/](https://libreboot.org/).

<comment><USER9> I.e. it's DRM-free pitch? That's the opposite of what I first took it for.

<comment><USER10> Yes, it's a DRM-free pitch. I suppose "Keep your … proprietary code safe" could seem DRM-related but "full owner control" is an FSF-y anti-DRM catchphrase.

<comment><USER11> It's a very odd mix, pitching user freedom with "proprietary engine code" as the example of data that is protected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're interested in it - support this pull request: [https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/pull/2585](https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/pull/2585)

<comment><USER13> If you're getting a 404, it's not because of an error in the URL.

You need to sign up here: [https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup](https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup)

<comment><USER11> I'm not going to sign up because their marketing pitch for making the engine "free[sic]" doesn't specify if they mean it is actually free software or just gratis + some proprietary source code you get a copy of.

Do you know which is the case? My hunch is it's probably the latter because they ask for royalties.

<comment><USER14> It's free as in beer, and you get to look at the source code. It's not libre software.

<comment><USER11> _sigh_ Figured as much.

<comment><USER15> ? you expect them to GPL a triple A game engine?

<comment><USER11> Yes. Why not?

<comment><USER12> Because they've spent tons of money on it and now want to earn something

<comment><USER11> >implying nobody can make money while respecting user freedom

This has been debunked so many times I'm not going to bother.

<comment><USER12> Let me rephrase - why would they lose part of their money - much money? I can't see what would be their profit on releasing UE under open source license. Moreover, what would be profit of others except the right of copying their code?

<comment><USER11> > I can't see what would be their profit on releasing UE under open source > license.

They have already forgone a lot of potential revenue by allowing anyone to get the source code for the engine (under a proprietary license) without paying anything. The only thing left is to design a non-royalty revenue model that can work with a free software license. This has already been solved.

> Moreover, what would be profit of others except the right of copying their > code?

Being able to release free software games using UE. Creating a community around UE that allows for innovation by that community. Porting to new platforms by that community. A show of good will to the free software community. There are many good reasons, but they all come about from giving people software freedom.

<comment><USER12> > They have already forgone a lot of potential revenue by allowing anyone to > get the source code for the engine (under a proprietary license) without > paying anything.

They're making to pay only those who has profits from using their engine. Those who has no profits (i.e. less than $3000) wouldn't buy it anyway.

> Being able to release free software games using UE.

You can do that now.

> Creating a community around UE that allows for innovation by that community.

There is a community.

> Porting to new platforms by that community.

You can do that now.

> There are many good reasons, but they all come about from giving people > software freedom.

I am for free software, but I don't like ideology in name of ideology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm happy to see usable non x86 hardware ! But we still have to solve emulation. I wonder if there is a way to decompile and recompile binaries. In theory it SHOULD be possible to convert what the CPU is asked to do, back to what the program does, and then convert it to another CPU.

An implementation like this would have a huge impact on new platform giving them a fighting change, allow competition without vendor lock-in.

<comment><USER17> Machine code translation is exactly how Intel Atom Android phones support apps containing native ARM code. Intel has a translator from ARM to x86 or x86_64 called Houdini. (I never managed to find any detailed information about it, it's propriety). Even if you're developing an app for Android using the NDK you may not realise that your phone doesn't have an ARM processor. Few people bother to ship x86 binaries, and the fact that works so well is why they still don't even as x86 devices become more common (they're mostly tablets). Compatibility is around 80% of apps [0], and the performance hit is somewhat substantial (e.g. 2x) but doesn't matter for most apps.

[0] [https://regmedia.co.uk/2014/04/30/watt_compatibility_large.j...](https://regmedia.co.uk/2014/04/30/watt_compatibility_large.jpg) [1] [https://commonsware.com/blog/2013/11/21/libhoudini-what- it-m...](https://commonsware.com/blog/2013/11/21/libhoudini-what-it-means-for- developers.html)</comment></comment>