Deletionpedia catalogs vanishing Wikipedia entries

It takes an Ars Technica blog post talking about its recent struggle to stay on as a Wikipedia entry to make me aware that there’s actually a website called Deletionpedia.

Deletionpedia, as you could have guessed, is a site automatically chronicling all the English-language entries that are deemed not worthy of almighty Wikipedia’s standards and subsequently deleted.

That translates into 63,551 pages so far, and it’s an excellent way to get a feel of what the standards of Wikipedia actually are all about.

Here’s how it works:

A Wikipedia user tags a page on Wikipedia as a candidate for deletion.

We upload all pages which have these tags to a temporary store. As of May 2008, this store holds about 10 GiB of data.

We check Wikipedia’s deletion log, which lists pages which are deleted from Wikipedia.

If the page which was deleted is in our temporary store, we upload it onto the Deletionpedia wiki

Most of the time, you’ll get server errors when browsing. If it does work, however, you’ll find lots of stuff that’s actually pretty interesting, like the List of films with monkeys in them, the Blabble Facebook App, and a list of minor bounty hunters from Star Wars.

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Allow me to quote Cyndy Aleo-Carreira from The Industry Standard:

“Deletionpedia would make a fine research project for sociology students to study what groupthink does when applied to a community-built compendium of knowledge. Better yet, a thorough review of the discussion pages may lead to a new psychological disorder being named, based on the need to examine trivial knowledge to a level of minutiae never seen before.”