Old Man Murray Wikipedia Controversy Continues 173
An anonymous reader writes "As discussed previously on slashdot, the Old Man Murray article was deleted from Wikipedia. After much controversy, the article has been restored. However, the debate to delete the article continues, with both deletionists and Old Man Murray fans swarming to the article."
Re:Uh, debate is where? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Uh, debate is where? (Score:3, Interesting)
Evades me (Score:2, Interesting)
The point of this Slashdot submission just totally evades me. Apparently someone nominated the article for deletion with perfectly sound reasoning in January. No proponents responded (meaning: nobody cared for the article), so it was deleted accordingly. Wikipedia does not accept something being articleworthy just because you know the organization / website / whatever – you have to provide evidence that this phenomena is real and notable – otherwise Wikipedia would be just full of all sorts of hoaxes and articles someone wrote from the top of their head one Saturday. See, not all phenomena are well-known in all subcultures, so we need neutral standards to measure what phenomena is articleworthy.
The closing admin thought the amount of participation (two votes) was not enough to form consensus, so when closing the debate he wrote he would (quote) "restore on request." Someone went ahead and requested restore, and the article was resurrected. Then, after a grace period, it was renominated, and wider participation was achieved. This time the closing admin was a bit trigger happy, but the article was again resurrected after quick discussion.
The deletion debate has since cooled, and the article seems now well-sourced and no deletion nomination is underway. There is one non-bot edit in the talk page during the last week or so. It boggles me how did this submission get through the screening process? It is totally pointless, and the advertised "debate to delete the article" is nowhere to be seen. Only thing I can come up with is someone getting butthurt from the deletion debate and deciding to have hard-failing "revenge" on the admins.
I can' believe Slashdot actually bought into this.
Re:So?? (Score:4, Interesting)
it has a large-but-finite space
I could be wrong about this, but as far as I'm aware, the full content (including edit history!) of wikipedia totals less than 5TB, which should by no means be difficult to house. Now, perhaps there are architectural considerations that I'm not taking into account, but even if that's the case, remember that these deletion discussions often grow to a size eclipsing that of the article being discussed.
This isn't about space. It's about image. Some Wikipedians don't want their encyclopedia hosting frivolous or trivial information, because that conflicts with the air of solemn academia they affect.
Ya I've never understood that (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean I understand that you want to delete things that are false, or that infringe copyright, or are illegal, or things like that. Right, no problem. But why delete things just because they aren't notable? As you said, it isn't as though we are going to run out of bits. Also it isn't as though it clutters things up, since you access information via search and thus skip over shit you don't care about. Thus there's no reason not to include everything, no matter how trivial and "un-notable"
What's more, the standard is clearly stupid since there is some extremely un-notable shit in there. The amount of articles on fictions characters from literature, including some pretty obscure ones from anime and shit is legion. This is not notable under any standard I can think about but there you go, large articles with lots of information. Doesn't bother me in the slightest, in fact I like it because if someone mentions then and I go "What the fuck is that?" I can find out.
Well if you are going to allow trivial shit like that, then I'd say all bets are off. Let pretty much anything that is true and sourced on there. Fuck notability.
People wanting to delete over notability are just worthless whiners who would rather bitch than contribute. They are saying "I don't find this interesting so I want it to go away," which is crap. I see the same shit on forums. Someone will start a new thread on a topic related to an existing thread and someone else will say "I don't see why this needs a new thread." My reply is "You know we don't pay by the thread, right?"
The reason they are saying it isn't because they are actually concerned, but because they want to try and shut down discussion on a topic they don't care about or don't like. It is just stupid.