Why it's hard to enter new content into Wikipedia

This summarises the discussion attempting to keep the CVonline hierarchy inside Wikipedia. I have deleted the personal insults posted about me.

1. (contested prod) promotional article for non-notable web page. Ref is to promotional page by web site's owner and article creator. No other indication of notability and a search turns up nothing. JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 20:22, 5 October 2011 (UTC)
2. Delete Promotional. Non Notable Sources do not establish notability. The wikilinked articles are all by the same user, and they should go as well.Tigerboy1966 (talk) 20:43, 5 October 2011 (UTC)
3. RBF: Hi - the historical CVonline resource was heavily used by the computer vision community, with almost 900,000 front page accesses in the past 10 years. It linked about 2000 core topics in computer vision into a nice hierarchical structure.

   Over the past few years, about 1000 of the 2000 topics have appeared in wikipedia, but there is no structure and so users, especially beginners, will not recognize the connections and generalizations between topics, which is what the hierarchy provided.

   The criticism that it is promoting a non-notable web site is a little beside the point: the purpose of this wikipedia page is to provide an anchor to the hierarchy. The hope is that the current external CVonline web site actually will fade away as the community develops the wikipedia content.

   One can provide this hierarchy and anchor outside of wikipedia, but then the community cannot easily collaboratively develop the hierarchy.

   There is no commercial or personal benefit to this page - it is provided as a public service.

   Having this page benefits everyone and provides no individual with special benefits, so I request that it should be left in wikipedia.

   I'd like to make a similar argument for the other computer vision list pages that we have created that have been flagged for deletion - they are part of the knowledge structuring that the computer vision community finds so helpful. They have only been up for a few weeks so have not yet had time to evolve inside wikipedia.

   If you like, I can request testimonials from the top computer vision scientists worldwide about the benefits and impact that CVonline has had, and what I hope it will continue to have by moving the structure into wikipedia. Eg: in the UK: Andew Blake, Managing Director, Microsoft Research Cambridge, David Hogg, Vice Principal Leeds University. Bob Fisher, Professor, University of Edinburgh (Rbfisher) .Preceding undated comment added 20:51, 5 October 2011 (UTC).

4. The issue is notability, which needs the subject to be discussed in reliable sources, independent of the subject. Testimonials of users or supporters of the site cannot be used. But if as you write the site has worldwide benefits and impact it should be easy to find references.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 21:05, 5 October 2011 (UTC)
5. RBF: Cvonline was developed solely as a web resource, although I have published a few printed articles describing it. As a testament to its use, entering "rbf/cvonline" into google produces about 19,000 hits. Some of the hits don't seem to contain the string, but most do, ie. they are referencing either the resource as a whole or some of its content. As another measure of impact, there have been 7800 front-page accesses to CVonline since the export of the structure into wikipedia was announced about a month ago.

   I agree that the CVonline wikipedia page could be deleted as there is currently nothing there (other than history) that is not replicated in the external page. My hope is that the external page can eventually be forgotten about and people would use the wikipedia page. I can see the issue of whether it is appropriate for wikipedia.

   On the other hand, the "list of X" pages that are linked from the cvonline page provide a resource not available elsewhere, and are the pages that users will want to edit when they create new wiki pages. The cvonline page provides an anchor to link all of the 'list' pages. We could easily move the links to the 'computer vision' wikipedia page. . Preceding unsigned comment added by Rbfisher (talk . contribs) 21:41, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

6. Comment Rbfisher suggests a very sensible compromise.Tigerboy1966 (talk) 22:03, 5 October 2011 (UTC)
7. I'm not sure what that compromise is. Articles on the site could be used if they were used as references, and may already being used as such. I would object to the index pages being linked: I had to remove a large number of such links after Papadim.G spammed them to dozens of articles to which they were little related, and now have prodded after he copied them wholesale here. But anyway, this AfD is about the page CVonline.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 22:45, 5 October 2011 (UTC)
8. I meant the suggestion to delete the CVonline page and move the links to Computer vision although I've just noticed that that article is assessed "B class" despite cleanup and inline tags, which I don't think can be correct.Tigerboy1966 (talk) 06:17, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
9. RBF: Papadim.G is one of my assistants and the cross linking that was deleted was our attempt at enhancing the utility of wikipedia. For example, CVonline lists 28 different curve representations, included in the List of image analysis object, world and scene representations page. The closest corresponding wikipedia article curve barely touches on a few of the representations. About half of the actual representations do not have a wikipedia article, and most of the remainder do not link to any of the alternative representationRbfisher 07:41, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
10. Delete: It's nice that the people involved with this website wish to help Wikipedia; we can always use more volunteers to develop and improve articles. But that's not the issue at stake here: it is whether the subject meets the pertinent notability guidelines - either WP:WEB or the GNG - to sustain an article. Has CVOnline "... been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the site itself?" Has it "... won a well-known and independent award from either a publication or organization?" There's no evidence that it has, and thus an article on the subject cannot be sustained. Ravenswing 16:19, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
11. Move to user space. Rbfisher asserts some utility to CVOnline users to having a Wikipedia page, and I don't dispute that. But WP:N doesn't contain a clause that says "except if it's useful for somebody", so it doesn't belong in article space. How about a move to User:Rbfisher/CVOnline? Or it can be another section in User:Rbfisher. Lagrange613 (talk) 18:38, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
12. Reply: Userfying is only appropriate if the intent is to build the article up until such time as it meets the requirements for articlespace. Since Wikipedia is not a web host, it's inappropriate to keep this content around on nothing more than the premise that CVOnline users need there to be a Wikipedia page containing it, whether in articlespace or in userspace, their convenience notwithstanding. Ravenswing 18:47, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
13. Yeah, good point. I guess my argument more amounts to move to another website, i.e., delete. Lagrange613 (talk) 19:33, 6 October 2011 (UTC) Delete. This clearly doesn't meet our notability requirements, or any realistic definition of what belongs in an encyclopedia. I'm shocked that a professor of informatics at a major university would think otherwise. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:39, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
14. RBF: I accept the opinions that the CVonline page should be deleted. But there are still 3 open issues: 1) Are the 'List of X' pages linked from the CVonline page viable as wiki pages? There are many other 'list' pages, eg. List_of_record_labels:_0-9. 2) Is there a suitable mechanism for collating all of the 'List of X' links in one place, eg. on the Computer Vision page? 3) If on that page, where? There is already a criticism about the 'See Also' section, although this strikes me as an ideal location. Should this discussion move to another page? If so, where? Rbfisher 20:46, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
15. No, they are not viable, i.e. good WP articles, as they they bear little relation to WP. for the same reason they should not be added to any other page. See also sections are for links relevant to the article which don't appear in the article, and generally contain only a few carefully chosen links, if any (as in many fairly comprehensive article all relevant links appear in the article). These are not contentious issues: Wikipedia is not a place to host content, including lists and indices, copied from other sources.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 21:08, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
16. RBF: I appreciate the benefits of a common style, but lists are common knowledge structuring devices. Here are 3 examples: 1) academic book indices are generally not simply alphabetic lists of words/concepts, but have a hierarchical structuring into subconcepts. 2) Modern versions of the printed Encyclopedia Brittanica included a resource called the Propaedia, with extensive sets of lists. 3) Some of the most useful web pages in my research area are essentially structured collections of links, such as the Kalman Filter homepage, Computer Vision homepage, Face Recognition homepage. It is not a historical anomaly - it is an attempt to help structure snippets of knowledge into usable larger structures. Search engines are great for dealing with flat knowledge resource, but it seems sensible to also exploit human expertise, and wikipedia is less than it could be without them. Rbfisher 07:25, 7 October 2011 (UTC)
17. Reply: All that is well and good, but Wikipedia has notability criteria governing what articles can or cannot be retained, and the question of meeting those criteria is the only issue at stake; whether or not an article is "useful" or not is a philosophic question outside our scope. The ones specifically pertaining to this one are WP:WEB and WP:GNG. Which elements of those criteria do you claim this article meets, and based upon what evidence? Ravenswing 11:25, 7 October 2011 (UTC)
18. See also WP:ITSUSEFUL. Many things are useful to someone or many people but that is not alone a reason to add them to Wikipedia.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 11:34, 7 October 2011 (UTC)
19. RBF: Quote from WP:ITSUSEFUL: 'For example, "This list brings together related topics in X and is useful for navigating that subject."'. That sums up the proposed lists, where X is Computer Vision. Rbfisher 17:34, 7 October 2011 (UTC)
20. Usefulness on its own is not a reason. But no, they are not useful navigation tools. Looking at the first one it lists "Land management", "Bengali", and "Cartoons/Sketches", completely unrelated topics. Besides it has links for none of those three, so in the very unlikely event that a reader stumbled upon the page when they were really looking for Bengali it would be of no help to them.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 17:55, 7 October 2011 (UTC)
21. RBF: Can you reset the deletions on all the 'list' pages until Nov 1? To give us time to set up alternative linking outside of wikipedia. Rbfisher 23:34, 8 October 2011 (UTC)
22. You can copy them yourself and host them yourself. Wikipedia is not your web host. You can always get and install MediaWiki yourself if you want to host them on a site like this, and there are other alternatives at that link.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 23:39, 8 October 2011 (UTC)
23. Delete fails WP:GNG. Stuartyeates (talk) 06:30, 9 October 2011 (UTC)
24. RBF: I have copied the pages in anticipation of their deletion. The issue is the that it will take a little while to set up an alternative service. The pages have been used by 5-10K people since they were installed in wikipedia a month ago. There is nothing offensive in the pages, they are a non-commercial public service, they are using only a 100kb and they will go soon. Deleting them tomorrow will disadvantage scholars and students worldwide. WP has nothing to lose by the short extension to the deletion date.Rbfisher 08:02, 9 October 2011 (UTC)