(Update) Never ones to take humor and criticism lying down, Wikipedia editors have already put a new page up for deletion: the one for Deletionpedia. The page in question, apparently created after our coverage here at The Standard hit Slashdot, was deemed by an editor as non-important or insignificant, the criteria for "speedy deletion."
Aside from the personal slight given as reason for deletion (our front-page article about Deletionpedia is only "a minor mention in The Industry Standard, which was then picked up by Slashdot"), it appears that the impetus for removal isn't so much due to insignificance (a site cataloguing nearly 64,000 pages deleted from Wikipedia seems to be a decent reference site as well as entertainment) as it is due to perceived criticism of Wikipedia itself.
The discussion at Slashdot included a healthy percentage of criticism of "Deletionism" at Wikipedia, with many commenters suggesting that Deletionpedia reflects an overzealous desire of editors to delete the contributions of others. While the meta aspect of writing about the potential deletion of a Wikipedia page about a site containing deletions from Wikipedia surely isn't lost on those participating in the discussion, it seems the editors are caught in a Catch-22. If they do delete the entry at this point, are they not proving the Slashdot commenters right? Is a site like Deletionpedia important enough to warrant its own entry if for no other reason than to highlight the others who may follow the Wikipedia edit process and find it problematic?
Update: The Wikipedia article has been saved:
More news, commentary, and predictions from The Industry Standard:
Comments
This follow-up has already been cited to support keeping the article. Hooray for recursion!
They won't care. The power tripping deletionists at Wikipedia have gotten way out of hand. No wonder many folks have stopped contributing, leaving the place to the trolls.
Is The Industry Standard willing to publish articles written by me? If not, can I accuse you of being power tripping deletionists for not allowing me my views?
FWIW, I think the Deletionpedia article should be kept, but that doesn't mean Wikipedia should have to keep everything that gets put there. Indeed, a quick look through Deletionpedia (try clicking on the Random page button) shows just how much rubbish gets up there. If anything, I would say that Deletionpedia gives support to the "Deletionist" viewpoint! I mean, it's a bit of an embarrassment that a site supposedly showing the problems of deletionism has such classics as "List of films with monkeys in them" ( http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=List_of_films_with_mo... )!
(I think deletionist-v-inclusionist is a bit simplistic - most editors will vote delete in some cases, keep in others, and everyone has different views on what the limits should be. Also, there are lots of good reasons for deleting articles, the only controversial one that people disagree over is the issue of "notability".)
One significant note about Deletionpedia: It does not track when deleted articles are reinstated. Some articles that are deleted are either revived after AfDs and speedy deletes on user talk pages and reinstated.
Yes, the pages on Deletionpedia are, for the most part, amazingly stupid. The "list of films with monkeys in them" has only three films on it... and none of the three actually has a monkey! This page tops my list of ROFL web pages.
Glad you liked my article on Deletionpedia, by the way.
A list of movies with monkeys in them is incredibly interesting to me. Vote: Keep.
Wikipedia is in a pretty sad state these days. I think the problem is that small souls think that if it has humor, it can't be serious at the same time.
The claim that people favoring deletion of the Deletionpedia article were doing so "due to perceived criticism of Wikipedia itself" is simply false. Anyone can read the deletion discussion and see that although such accusations were made by some people favoring keeping, no one favoring deletion made any statement remotely like that. I argued strenuously in favor of keeping the article and find the claim to be unhelpful and inaccurate. Moreoever, if Wikipedians routinely wanted to delete articles that criticized the project would we really have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_Wikipedia which has over 150 footnotes?
I disagree Joshua, mostly because the request to have the article speedily deleted was placed a minute after the very first edit created it in the first place. If that's not over-zealous defense against a perceived slight then I'm not sure anything could be.
PBarkley, that's more a comment about how the Wikipedia speedy deletion system currently functions. There was a recent edition of Not the Wikipedia Weekly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NTWW where they tried to start an article in real-time and improve it to a decent status. The article got speedy deleted early on in its creation. The article was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_Legs_Rag a song from 1906. The issue in this case isn't criticism of the project. The issue is zealous speedy deleters. Indeed, having looked at the speedied version of the article, speedying was not an unreasonable response as the article was written at that time.
Article in Wikipedia about similar Russian project - wikigrain.org was deleted from Wikipedia in just two minutes.
Post new comment