Wikipedia's deletion policies has lead to wiki forks of various kind such as the webcomic encyclopedia, Comixpedia. It was also one of the reason why I choose to create a niche encyclopedia just for open source games.
However, I choose to look at it as a benefit rather than a negative. A subject that is not well known is more likely to be vandalized over time then expanded by editors.
A specialized wiki that has a sense of ownership from its editor will be far more successful at preventing long-term vandalism and neglect.
This was very nice to read. In my experience with articles for deletion, I've never seen the closing administrator's reasons laid out like this. I hope this happens more often than it used to.
It won't happen more often because a page like that is a massive timesink. I'd bet that Flyguy649 has spent at a minimum 3 or 4 hours reviewing comments, doing some searches, writing this up, and so on.
(It's easy to be cynical and say "good! If admins have to invest 3 or 4 hours on each article they delete, then Wikipedia will be better for't", but really, most articles on AfD deserve to be deleted and asking 3 or 4 hours of each admin per AfD is a good way to destroy Wikipedia.)
I've heard it claimed that democracy tends to achieve the correct decision in the long run, but with the drawback of taking a lot of time and effort. This case is certainly supporting evidence for all of those points.
Wikipedia's AFD procedure is explicitly not democratic. The voting does not determine the outcome--it's a heuristic meant to help the admin. The criterion for keeping or deleting is consensus and the weight of the arguments on either side (insofar as they are relevant to Wikipedia's general principles). Do not mistake this admin's overview for a summary of a vote--it is not a democracy, and that's not a bad thing.
Whether it's a democracy depends on what you think a democracy is. My view is that a democracy is a system where all voices are encouraged to speak up, are heard, given due consideration, and approved or rejected by a community. The whole voting thing is one particular implementation of democracy. It's not necessarily a good approximation of those democratic ideals, but it's practical and it scales well, which makes it Good Enough(tm). Wikipedia's policy of considering arguments rather than votes for page-level decisions is something I would call more democratic than straight-up vote-counting, given the scale that it operates at, the strict (and explicit--rule of law is important) guidelines by which positions are weighed, and the general good-faith of those making the judgments.
YMMV. The definition of democracy is probably worth a thread in its own right. However, regardless of whatever label we each choose to call those policies, we're in accord that those policies are generally well-designed.
Is Wikipedia a directory of note-worthy open source software, or does it strictly cover software with actual notability? How do you decide what a reliable source is for a topic that gets most of its coverage in a medium where anyone can write about the topic?
This seems like one of those AfD's that will either hold back a flood of other articles, or open the floodgates. It looks to me like the process is working, but I've only read 4 minutes worth of the discussion.
No, Wikipedia has been overrun by people who dedicate a spectacular amount of time trying to build an encyclopedia according to a fairly rigid set of rules that has successfully built one of the Internet's signature resources entirely on volunteer effort.
In 2010AD, the Wikilawyers have amassed a large amount of evidence that the Wikicritics lack: an actual encyclopedia that, despite virtually owning the front page of Google, has not been gamed into irrelevance.
I take that evidence into account, and the amount of effort WP volunteers clearly put into the project, and come to the conclusion that they should get a whole hell of a lot more slack than they appear to get on fora like this.
However, I choose to look at it as a benefit rather than a negative. A subject that is not well known is more likely to be vandalized over time then expanded by editors.
A specialized wiki that has a sense of ownership from its editor will be far more successful at preventing long-term vandalism and neglect.