Talk:Wikipedia – The Missing Manual

Internal links
See our own Signpost's review at Wikipedia Signpost/2008-03-03/Book review.

Interview with author: Wikipedia Signpost/2008-01-28/John Broughton interview

See mention of a small "reader's guide" version at Wikipedia Signpost/2008-05-12/Maker Faire.


 * Should we really avoid putting these in the article? The interview, for example, provides some good information. I think we should treat them just as we would any other link (not doing so would be a self reference in itself if you think about it), and if that means including them we should do so. Richard001 (talk) 23:39, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Valuable resource for Wikipedians
I just bought it the other day at Barnes & Noble (list price: $29.99). It really seems like "the Missing manual." --Ludvikus (talk) 18:11, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia The Missing Manual vs. Wikipedia-The Missing Manual

 * The new title (Wikipedia-The Missing Manual) is ugly in the extreme. I suggest the fomer, or in the alternative Wikipedia, The Missing Manual - practice in titles vs. subtitles. But also, consider the example of On The Jewish Question. Cheers, Wikipedian. --Ludvikus (talk) 18:22, 12 May 2008 (UTC)


 * A third alternative might be Wikipedia - The Missing Manual. --Ludvikus (talk) 18:24, 12 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Another alternative is Wikipedia (book), although I think I prefer this one (and I think that title will become ambiguous very soon, if it hasn't already). John should have thought about this conflict when naming the book :) Richard001 (talk) 01:06, 24 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Just redirect all such possibilities to the same place. No more problem. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 22:08, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Notability
Only one review is provided here, which isn't really enough to establish notability. Has it been reviewed by any other notable sources? This is Wikipedia, so it looks like we are being biased by having an article about this book and not most other books of greater notability. Richard001 (talk) 01:28, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
 * We have lots of systemic bias. See also Eventualism and Incrementalism. ;) But yes, more content would be good here. -- Quiddity (talk) 02:26, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Sure, sure, I'm not saying we should have to write articles on every book that is 'more notable' than this one before having the article. In fact, I think systematic bias isn't always a bad thing; imagine if we had lots of articles on things that nobody was ever going to read about and none that were relevant to English speaking people. Two pages that have some review collections are and . I haven't got time to go through them, but they should give some indication of whether the book has received enough attention to merit an article. Richard001 (talk) 23:09, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Richard001, O'Reilly lists a couple non-blogs in media reviews if you'd like to add Publisher's Weekly. I added one to the article. —SusanLesch (talk) 08:00, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Oh the bitter irony: A reflection on this recent article for deletion
Here is a portion of the New York Review of Books review, the "one review" the editor mentions above:
 * {| class="wikitable collapsible collapsed"

!align=left width=700px|The Charms of Wikipedia March 20, 2008 Nicholson Baker New York Review of Books. Still, a lot of good work—verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange—is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow, almost grade-schoolish notion of what sort of curiosity an online encyclopedia will be able to satisfy in the years to come.

'''Anybody can "pull the trigger" on an article (as Broughton phrases it)—you just insert a double-bracketed software template. It's harder to improve something that's already written, or to write something altogether new''', especially now that so many of the World Book–sanctioned encyclopedic fruits are long plucked. There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking peoples' work—even to the point of laughing at nonstandard "Engrish." They poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away.

In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists—some of the most original and articulate people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the "web-comic articles purge of 2006." A victim, Trev-Mun, author of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: "I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others' sand castles." Another artist, Howard Tayler, said: "'Notability purges' are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors." Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organized deleters to book burners, and he said: "Your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene. Every word in every valid article you've destroyed should be converted to profanity and screamed in your face."

As the deletions and ill-will spread in 2007—deletions not just of webcomics but of companies, urban places, Web sites, lists, people, categories, and ideas—all deemed to be trivial, "NN" (nonnotable), "stubby," undersourced, or otherwise unencyclopedic—Andrew Lih, one of the most thoughtful observers of Wikipedia's history, told a Canadian reporter: "The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow." In September 2007, Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia's panjandrum—himself an inclusionist who believes that if people want an article about every Pokemon character...
 * }

"'Notability purges' are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors...Your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene." I couldn't have said it better myself. travb (talk) 21:35, 7 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Oh yeah, those tin-pot dictators... gotta watch out for them! Richard001 (talk) 05:55, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Tumbleweed
And now, twelve years later, it seems to me that the book was not notable after all. In fact, the NYRB article brandished by the keep-voters of December 2008 is not really a review of the book: like many articles packaged as reviews of nonfiction books, it is more accurtately described as an author giving their own ruminations about the same topic as the book and occasionally mentioning the book in passing. Whether such a review confers the book with the status of "subject of [a] non-trivial published work" is open for debate, but at Wikipedia talk:Notability (books) rather than here. jnestorius(talk) 15:55, 25 June 2021 (UTC)