The Project To Revive Abandoned Wikipedia Pages Has Been Abandoned (theoutline.com)

For years, an "entrepreneurial spirit" kept alive several of abandoned articles on Wikipedia. The WikiProject called Abandoned Articles, which sought to bring abandoned articles back to life, or "if appropriate, merging information or recommending deletion" is no more...for a long time. From an article on the Outline: A few editors are still listed as active, but most don't actively edit articles anymore. The few I tried to contact didn't get back to me. One email address I found bounced back. Many seem to have moved on with their lives. The concept of "abandoned" Wikipedia articles, one finds, when one peruses the Abandoned project for a few minutes, is sort of outmoded. Back in 2007, when the project was really last active, Wikipedia was a much different place. One user who occasionally edited "stub" articles -- those with little to no content, often the first on the chopping block for deletion because of their lack of "relevance" -- told me that "back then Wikipedia was a lot emptier. It was occasionally possible to find, like, sort of significant people or whatever -- a photographer -- whose entire Wikipedia entry amounted to the work of two people." Now that Wikipedia averages, according to its own statistics, 10 edits per second and 800 new articles a day, a group dedicated to articles that are dormant -- not deleted, simply left to grow over with weeds -- seems almost quaint. In fact, of the many articles still listed as needing to be adopted, almost none are currently abandoned: Straight Face was deleted in December 2007; Pavane got further disambiguated; "From a View to a Kill" was inhaled into the greater entry for For Your Eyes Only, a short story collection by Ian Fleming; likewise, Forward Link was added to the larger entry for "Telecommunications link."

Comments

Baloney

[Frosty Piss]

it's hard to keep unpaid volunteers interested in doing the drudge work for any length of time.

Baloney. It's hard to keep unpaid volunteers interested in putting up with the incredibly stupid politics that permeate Wikipedia...

still happening.

[Gravis Zero]

Back in 2007, when the project was really last active, Wikipedia was a much different place. One user who occasionally edited "stub" articles -- those with little to no content, often the first on the chopping block for deletion because of their lack of "relevance"

There are still users (like Cahk) that suggest articles for deletion (within one hour) if they don't have enough content, even if there are many other articles already pointing to the article.

This kind of bullshit will never end.

Re:Once more socialism has failed

[ShanghaiBill]

I've heard many complain that they were never going to bother editing a Wikipedia page again, because it was like writing on the wind.

That's me. I contributed quite a bit in the early days of Wikipedia. I also donated money. But I had too much of my work deleted by some teenage admin with a Napoleon complex. I haven't contributed or donated in years, and I won't ever again until the deletionism stops. Wikipedia is not printed on paper, so there is no inherent practical limit to how much information it can contain. Every article matters to the people that wrote it, and to the people that seek it out and read it. Nobody else will see it. So why delete it? "Noteworthiness" should not be a binary "in or out". It should be a continuum so more noteworthy articles appear higher in the search list, but should not be used to justify deletion of more obscure information.

Should there be a Wiki page for every Pokemon character? If someone wants to write the pages, and people are interested in reading about them, then of course they should each have a page.

Disclaimer: The pages I edited were not about Pokemon. I just used Pokemon as an example, because the Pokemon pages and the community involved in them, were indeed attacked and destroyed by the deletionists.