

Tom Preston-Werner (this page has been deleted) - drewwwwww
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Preston-Werner

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tptacek
The deletion of this Wikipedia article isn't a verdict on the notability of
Tom Preston-Werner.

It's a verdict on _the quality of the Wikipedia article_. In this case, the
deletion says, "the article that was here did not explain why Tom Preston-
Werner was an appropriate subject for a Wikipedia article". Wikipedia articles
about living people that don't even say why the subject is notable are subject
to automatic deletion, for reasons I explained to 'tzs downthread.

This is a problem with a straightforward solution. Create a new draft of a Tom
Preston-Werner article, with a clear (but dry, factual, and assiduously cited)
explanation in 2 sentences or less in the first graf of the article for why
Tom Preston-Werner is notable. Use the "new article wizard" to do this.

A slightly more aggressive way to respond to this deletion would be to take
the deletion itself to Wikipedia Deletion Review (DRV); the DRV page has
_extensive_ details about how to do that.

Be aware before you do this that many of Tom Preston-Werner's best-known
accomplishments are already the subjects of Wikipedia articles, and that the
editors of Wikipedia might reasonably reject a new article about him if it
adds no notable facts to Wikipedia's preexisting coverage of his work.

The downside to writing a new draft is that the draft might be wasted effort
if it merely recapitulates Wikipedia's coverage of Gravatar and Github.

The downside to taking the deletion to DRV is that you might end up litigating
the decision to delete the article, which, if the original article was really
bad (unsourced, no claim to notability) is probably a losing argument.

------
johnx123-up
FWIW, Tom Preston-Werner is Cofounder & CEO at GitHub

Edit: His LinkedIn profile <http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tom-preston-
werner/4/122/382>

------
setori88
reason for deletion?

~~~
rsync
The cult of "deletionism" insists that hard drive space is so precious at
wikipedia it can't possibly be used for entries that Joe-Little-Kid-Wikipedia-
Bigshot hasn't heard of.

Always funny (and sad) when they get it this wrong. Jason Scott speaks of it
better than anyone else:

<http://archive.org/details/20060408-jscott-wikipedia>

~~~
teraflop
I think that's misleading. The folks who go around deleting articles are not
the ones who have to worry about things like server capacity. They do it
because they think it keeps the standard of quality higher.

The article's not in Google's cache anymore, but as far as I can tell from the
snippet, it apparently consisted only of the sentence: "Tom Preston-Werner is
the creator of Gravatar and co-founder/CEO of GitHub." That's more information
than I knew from reading the headline of this post, but it's a far cry from an
encyclopedia article. I don't see what's lost by deleting it until someone's
willing to put in the effort to write something substantial.

~~~
tzs
> I don't see what's lost by deleting it until someone's willing to put in the
> effort to write something substantial

He's mentioned as creator of Gravatar and co-creator of Github in their
respective Wikipedia articles. When someone is mentioned as a prominent figure
in connection with something that is Wikipedia-worthy, it is quite natural for
someone reading that article to wonder "what else has this guy done?" and want
to click his name to find out. Now people who ask that question have to resort
to the search box.

Deleting articles like this also, I suspect, reduces the chances that someone
will put in the effort to make a more substantial article. Someone thinking of
doing so will see that there once was an article and it was deleted, which
will discourage them as they might worry that their work too will be deleted.
Better, I think, to leave it there as a seed from which a more substantial
article might grow.

~~~
tptacek
Wikipedia articles aren't intended to express a graph the way a "who's who"
database does. Every article in the encyclopedia is expected to do a good job
summarizing it subject and providing a guide to reputable sources on that
subject.

The problem with stub articles _about people_ that serve only to map a person
to every Wikipedia subject they've touched is WP:BLP.

To sum that up: every article about a living person has to meet a higher
standard of "not being wrong about that person", because when Wikipedia lists
something wrong about (say) Tom Preston-Werner, it's plastering that wrongness
at the top of every Google SERP, and this tends to piss people off. For
obvious reasons, BLP articles are also a magnet for the most insidious kind of
vandalism WP deals with: negative claims about real people that are difficult
or impossible to refute "automatically", which is how virtually all vandalism
on WP is handled. WP BLP articles thus incur a liability for the project.

Often, that liability is more than offset by the value of the article itself.
But here, it seems like much of the value of a T.P-W article is simply in
making it slightly easier to search for T.P-W in WP. But WP already does a
pretty good job of doing that. Marginal value, maximum liability.

