

Wikipedia deletes entry on PBWiki, the biggest hosted competitor with 550,000 wikis - vlad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBWiki

======
tptacek
Misleading title. "Wikipedia" didn't do anything; an Articles-for-Deletion
(AfD) vote did. In the vote, which has a full change history, _nobody_ spoke
up for PeanutButter Wiki, nor were any of the sources mentioned in the
comments here present in the original article. This was a totally normal, in-
process deletion.

Should the closing admin have glanced at Google News? Probably. Note that one
of the AfD votes here makes indirect references to external sources, implying
that they only peripherally cover PBWiki as "just another wiki farm". Maybe
that's fair, maybe not, but you can see why in a "debate" with no dissenters,
this just got closed quickly.

The fix for this is trivial. Take the original content of the PBWiki Wikipedia
article --- it's still around --- and paste it back into the article. Add the
external sources to the end (don't even worry about style, someone else will
fix it). Done. An article with genuine sourcing in Newsweek, Forbes, and the
New York Times isn't going to be deleted.

God I'm such a dork for knowing this stuff.

~~~
wehriam
I'm starting to see Wikipedians as cops with big mustaches. Mostly harmless,
generally the good guys, but often symbolically overstepping their bounds.

I acknowledge the rigorous formalized system, but even a speedy response does
not justify the offense.

It appears there is bias here. Instead of instructing us on how to
participate, the members of the community should address it.

~~~
tptacek
I'm not a member of the community. I am, however, telling you how the
community works. Let me be as clear as I can, from experience: _the community
does not care what you think about it_. It's a Greenland-sized snowball full
of human frailties and weaknesses and effort, picking up every piece of
information and drama it rolls over, and getting out in front of it to try to
steer it is a great way to lose an otherwise enjoyable weekend.

~~~
wehriam
I'm no stranger. (To the point that I disassociate!) I couldn't agree more on
the futility of trying to bend Wikipedia to your will.

But I reject the "play along, or else, I don't care" methodology. Democracies
are often wrong. We have to hold the community as a whole accountable.

------
jbyers
Wikispaces (a PBWiki competitor) had our Wikipedia entry deleted in August
2006. At the time we were non-notable and had a medium- to low-quality entry
written by others. During our deletion process, we argued that it was
perfectly reasonable that Wikipedia delete our article, but it seemed quite
unreasonable to single us out of a dozen other non-notable wiki farms (not to
mention hundreds of other non-notable websites) that were not being considered
for deletion. The response from the AfD commentors was in essence, "fine, go
ahead and propose deletion for the wiki farms you think don't belong". We of
course had no interest in doing that.

I was upset for some time that our article was deleted, but I'm not anymore.
Wikipedia's standards don't work for small companies. In August 2006 when our
article was deleted, we had less than 100,000 users and 50,000 wikis. Today we
have 1.4M users, 595,000 wikis, and a healthy and growing business. A
Wikipedia entry might be nice to have, but it doesn't have anything to do with
how we serve our customers and build our business.

------
bbb
Maybe it just wasn't notable? I've never even heard of PBWiki.

~~~
dweekly
It's fair that you might not have heard of PBwiki, but a Wikipedia admin
should have at least given a cursory glance at what's out there, including in
the last 30 days alone mentions in Newsweek, Forbes, the New York Times,
LinuxInsider, WebWorkerDaily, Mashable, and Wired News.

[http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=pbwiki...](http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=pbwiki&btnG=Search+News)

~~~
bbb
Maybe.

But Wikipedia is not the "list of all businesses in the world." It's not even
the "list of all businesses that got mentioned by $X" where $X in Newsweek,
Forbes,...

What has the company done that is special? Did it innovate in some special
way? Was it involved in some notable affair? Is it the market leader in some
domain?

If it's just another wiki farm that happens to have a PR department worth its
money then it doesn't necessarily have to be listed in Wikipedia.

Note that I'm not saying that PBWiki shouldn't be listed (I don't know them,
after all), but that I'm saying that hits on Google News don't imply that it
_must_ be listed.

Deletions occur all the time. If you think an article got unfairly deleted,
resurrect it and put in better citations.

On top of that, PBWiki is not even a competitor to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the
wiki. MediaWiki is the software powering Wikipedia. PBwiki's software may
compete with MediaWiki. PBwiki's hosting service competes with neither
MediaWiki nor Wikipedia --- neither "product" is in the hosting business.

------
SarahToton
It's odd that Wikipedians would delete the article, instead of just changing
it to say, "PBWiki: a collaborative website for sandwich lovers."

------
paulgb
That headline is a bit sensationalist. PBWiki isn't really a competitor to
Wikipedia. Or Wikia, even.

------
alaskamiller
Last known position:

23:37, September 15, 2008 Punkmorten (Talk | contribs) deleted "PBWiki" ‎ (R1:
Redirect to a deleted, nonexistent, or invalid target)

I can't find the original PBWiki page but it's more likely that it wasn't up
to snuff instead of a blatant conflict of interest delete.

~~~
alaskamiller
for what it's worth here's a wiki page comparing various wiki software and
most of the other companies have pages.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software>

the magic of wikipedia is of course that david weekly can get an intern to put
back the page.

~~~
dweekly
But David Weekly is honorable and tries to minimize self-interested editing
and surreptitious sock-puppeting. ;)

