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Call For Halt To Wikipedia Webcomic Deletions
ObsessiveMathsFreak writes "Howard Tayler, the webcomic artist of Schlock Mercenary fame, is calling on people not to donate money during the latest Wikimedia Foundation fund-raiser. This is to protest the 'notability purges' taking place throughout Wikipedia, where articles are being removed en-masse by what many see as overzealous admins. The webcomic community in particular has long felt slighted by the application of Wikipedia's contentious Notability policy. Wikinews reporters have recently begun investigating this issue, but are the admins listening?"
I would disagree actually. The only way to be eligible for that criteria would be for an article to say "Such and such is a web comic." and that's it. The criteria states the article "does not indicate the importance or significance of its subject." I'd say this is pretty fair.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's kind of hard to find the full text of articles which were deleted to verify that they were more than just stubs, but here's at least one deletion citing CSD A7 as sufficient to speedily delete a webcomic article.
There are people who boost their ego by counting the pages they managed to wipe.
Considering that these people are permanent visitors to wikipedia, while those who could defend a page are not necessarily, this is a slightly uphill battle.
On the other hand, who said wikipedia must have an exhaustive list+synopsys of all webcomics, films, etc.
Maybe the problem is that it isn't clear what wikipedia must have.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
RTFA. And the comments, too.
It also seems you're ignoring a lot of votes in favor of keeping the webcomic articles. An example from the aforementioned comments: Checkerboard Nightmare's (though it didn't end up deleted since even after deleting over half of the keep votes, the keeps were still in majority). What the fuck is up with that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-in_candidate (Insomnia strikes again!)
~ C.
Dang... to mod or to comment... to mod or to comment... well, let's clear this misconception that is so common for people who is not regular at Wikipedia. Deletion discussions, also known as XFD, aren't "votes" where simple majority wins. It is a search for consensus, where everyone states their opinion, and in the end the best argument is used to close the discussion.
It is the task of admins and other people in the discussion to reveal "single purpose accounts", accounts created just to stockpile in either side of the discussion. It is clear that, somehow, a user of the webcomic found the Wikipedia entry of the comic was being deleted, and "called to arms", posting in a forum or a comment in the webcomic asking others to come and "vote keep". For example, 216.134.160.149 faked a username, "Blackbyrd2". Other than his opinion about the AFD, he never contributed to Wikipedia afterwards. Same for 149.169.88.9, Captainhero, etc. Some become constructive members of the community, of course, but at the time of the discussion, they are considered SPA based on the duck test.
Now, you may ask whether the opinion of someone who arrives asked to stockpile is worth or not. Wikipedia welcomes all opinions, but for the sake of keeping the discussion clean, we mark these accounts with the {{spa}} template. The closing admin is asked to keep in mind these users don't know Wikipedia policies and guidelines for notability, that they are biased (either for the keep or delete side), and that it is possible they won't be able to defend their opinion because SPA don't usually go back to Wikipedia after the first opinion. The template {{afdanons}} is put at the top of these discussions to let them know about the basic rule of XFD: it is a discussion, not a vote. If the deletion reasoning is strong, unless there is a keep reasoning as strong as it, it will be deleted.
Trivia to you may be critical information to someone else. Obscure facts are often important to someone, even if most people could do without them. It may do little good to keep it there, but it does NO good to take it away (and I'd suggest makes it worse, as people will often check WP first knowing that it'll have an article on even the most obscure things, only to find it's gone).
I'd read about all sorts of random internet subculture on Wikipedia some time ago, and when I went to pull it up again for whatever reason, the whole lot of it was gone. Not only did I never find the information a second time (I sure as hell can't be bothered to look through dozens of pages of revisions), but I wasted a lot of time clicking around and hoping I'd stumble across it as is so common on Wikipedia. Yes, it was trivia. No, it wasn't especially important information - but that's true of a ton of things. Nonetheless, I'd found it interesting, and wasted a bunch of time in vain trying to find it again. It might not have done me much good to find it, but I was worse off with it not being there thanks to all the wasted time looking.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Wikipedia seems to be having some issues with admins deleting articles in connection to their notability guidelines lately. PortableApps.com, the website that makes available portable software that runs from removable media (like a portable version of Firefox) was recently deleted under the notability guidelines with very little notice (aka speedy deletion). This despite the fact that it's the most popular portable platform (more popular than the commercial ones), in the top 10 on SourceForge, in the top 5,000 websites in the world and has been extensively covered in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, PC Magazine, PC World, Wired, etc.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I can give a valid example of overzealous deletion. I organize the group that builds the page on Alcoholism. There are about a half dozen notable, reputable organizations that provide counseling and services to alcoholics and their families. Most of them had established pages in Wikipedia, until someone went through and deleted the articles for #2, 3, and 4, leaving AA and a couple that probably were just overlooked by the admins. The reason give was "non-notability", although two of the three have national memberships in the thousands. Deletion reviews for those two were summarily dismissed by a different admin as "blatant copyright violations", even though the content specifically met Wikipedia's copyright guidelines (similar to existing material, but written by the same author). The admin responsible deleted my attempts to discuss it on his user page without a response. I'm very disappointed.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.