The Great Wikipedia Webcomics Purge of 2007
Earlier today, I posted the following at the Teleblog.
Kristofer Straub made a point. Specifically, that those who want to delete all mention of webcomics from Wikipedia for being non-notable seem to get much more leeway than those feeling that a so-called encyclopedia should endeavor to describe all facets of life. Reasons for deletion? Who needs reasons?
Straub set out to get the entry about his own comic deleted, and succeeded. In order to do so, he started the deletion process for Starslip Crisis and created several sockpuppet accounts to support the delete. The sockpuppets used shaky logic to support the delete — Wikipedia barely wants to know if a deletion is Right, only if it is Supported. The account that he used to start the deletion process was new. It had not been involved in any editing before, just as one would expect of the account of someone with personal reasons to get an entry deleted.
Interestingly enough, somebody had created a sockpuppet to vote keep; this was discovered by Wikipedians, and the puppeteer’s votes were not counted. But apparently no one discovered that ten of the delete votes came from sockpuppets too.
It would appear that the Deletionist faction is gaining importance at Wikipedia. If the rules that the Deletionists live by were followed to the very end, shouldn’t the Wikipedia entry about Wikipedia be deleted too?
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