Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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?
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.