
Wikipedia is now deleting entries about its own practice of deleting entries - nickb
http://thenerfherder.blogspot.com/2008/09/debate-over-deletionism-at-wikipedia.html
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tptacek
This isn't about Wikipedia's practice of deleting entries, which is documented
in huge, sprawling, mind-numbing detail, accompanied by 3x the word count of
huge, sprawling, mind-numbing debates about the wisdom of those policies.

What it is instead is an article about one guy's side project,
"Deletionpedia", which is a wiki that captures the pages Wikipedia deletes.
That article hasn't even been deleted; it's just (apparently) been put up for
deletion.

Wikipedia is a huge project. You can put Bill Gates' article up for deletion
right now. Nobody will stop you. The debate will be short (I'd expect
"seconds, not minutes"), but that's because everyone knows who Bill Gates is,
and nobody knows what Deletionpedia is, which means it lives or dies on its
merits, and not name ID.

Can we stop making mountains out of molehills now?

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cdr
I agree. I don't understand why these shrill anti-Wikipedia links keep ending
up on HN.

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tptacek
Because people vote them up. Hey, people. Stop voting these up!

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hugh
Headline is both misleading and out-of-date anyway, since they've already
decided to keep the article after a long debate (and in the meantime, an
improvement of the article). The system works.

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rw
Deletion decisions on Wikipedia are made by users, not a singular entity known
as "Wikipedia."

~~~
altano
People tend to anthropomorphize for dramatic effect. It's very unbecoming.

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josefresco
He who controls the present controls the past.

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time_management
Wikipedia is, surprisingly, quite a fine reference. I say this because the
amount of power and influence a person has is directly correlated (in fact,
exponential in this variable) to the defectiveness of his personality. The
"administrators" are mostly mentally-ill shut-ins playing Internet Tough Guy,
and edit-warring with them, even when objectively right, is a lost cause
(you'll run into the "3-revert rule", which basically means that if you don't
allow groupthink to bulldoze you, you get blocked or banned). Still, it's a
great reference 99% of the time, and I'm amazed that this can be the case,
given the putrid nature of the WP community.

