Visualizing the deletion process on Wikipedia

David Weinberger sez, "Notabilia has visualized the hundred longest discussion threads at Wikipedia that resulted in the deletion of an article and the hundred that did not. The visualized threads take on shapes depending on whether the discussion was controversial, swinging, or unanimous. For those whose brains can process visualized information (as mine cannot), you will undoubtedly learn much. For the rest of us: Oooooh, pretty! They also have analyzed data using words. E.g., Delete decisions tend to be unanimous."

Visualizing Deletion Discussions on Wikipedia (Thanks, DavidJoho, via Submitterator!)

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Anonymous

perhaps i am missing something but all of the “keeps” have been deleted!
Anonymous

Very nice visualization.
Weird that a lot of AfDs that resulted in deletion are about judaism, and several which resulted in keeping are about Harry Potter. In particular, why is ‘List of jewish communists’ almost unanimously voted for deletion, while ‘Second Wizardry War’ was kept? Is “communist” still considered some kind of insult?

And ‘North America’ was deleted (It now exists again), while Boxxy was kept?
Or am I misreading the graph?
jamesscottbrown

An alternative presentation: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1194912/AfD%20poster.pdf (warning, pdf)
Anonymous

It’s sad that this visualization exists at all, as the true information it conveys is:

a) the amount of well-intentioned, hard work that is deleted on a regular basis

b) the amount of meta-work that is wasted on these “notability” discussions

All well-formed, well-cited articles belong in the wikipedia. Hard drive space is cheap and plentiful, and the existence of trivial articles in the wikipedia does not in any way hinder your usage of the articles you find “notable”.
- freshacconci
  
  But all “well-formed, well-cited articles” do remain on Wikipedia. Most deleted articles are deleted for legitimate reasons, i.e. they are unsourced and there’s no evidence that the subject is notable at this time. It has nothing to do with trivial articles. If you want trivial, Wikipedia has it.
Anonymous

Just to be clear: this isn’t a visualization of Wikipedia’s entire deletion process. It’s a (really cool) visualization of one deletion process, the one called Articles for Deletion that involves a request for comment that lasts a week.
tuckels

I love these kind of things, and without this website, I’d never have discovered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cats_with_fraudulent_diplomas , which, thankfully was not deleted.
- freshacconci
  
  The deletion discussion is actually quite fascinating:
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_cats_with_fraudulent_diplomas
freshacconci

Speaking of stats and neat graphs, the Edit Counter tool is always fun. You plug in an editor’s username and it lets you know some factoids about what they’ve done. The page history stats does the same thing for articles with all sorts of data and graphs. Endless fun.

http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/ec
http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/articleinfo/