[WikiEN-l] Re: How did this happen (comixpedia??)

[David Gerard]

Darin Brown wrote:

>Here we do run into an issue which esp. tricky in this particular case. By
>its very nature, webcomics and the webcomics community are going to eschew
>the more traditional verification mechanisms, most esp. those found in
>print. Of course -- the entire phenomenon itself is based around the
>internet. The entire *community* itself, its own internal verification
>procedures, its own internal conditions upon which it deems verification
>necessary, are non-traditional. It is disingenuous to hold it accountable to
>similar verification procedures as say, mathematics or physics. You are not
>going to find thousands of references to webcomix in the academic
>literature. And it will be very difficult to find many in print. The fact
>is, the phenomenon of webcomix itself is highly radical and raises serious
>issues about the nature of verification itself


Oh, it's much better than that. There is in fact a real genuine actual
peer-reviewed academic journal on comics called ImageTexT
(http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/). One of the managing editors
is Phil Sandifer, who you will know better as Snowspinner. In a
jawdropping assumption of bad faith (which is, of course, the reason
why AFD is so poisonous to the Wikipedia community in its present
form), the AFD regulars did their damnedest to get coverage in it
excluded from the webcomics guidelines *because* Snowspinner was the
editor. The excuse was that he was too involved or too close or knew
too much or something.

This was after they'd driven off a previous comics expert for knowing
more than them on the topic, leading him to say "you people are
clearly idiots" and form Comixpedia.

geni will, if he reads back, agree that this is closer to the
chronology of what actually happened in the formation of the comics
inclusion guidelines: (1) provably bad AFD, (2) deliberate attempt to
exclude academic expert for being an expert, (3) guidelines then
formed such that the bad AFD would have led to a deletion.

(Don't take my word for it - read the talk page, it's amazing. Note in
particular the direct assertion that editors who confess to knowing
*NOTHING* on a topic should have their opinions count just as much as
an actual provable expert, for the purposes of achieving "consensus" -
remembering that the AFD jargon meaning of "consensus" is a two-thirds
vote. Therefore, that a two-thirds majority of editors who
*admittedly* know nothing at all about a topic can get the topic
excluded from Wikipedia altogether over the objections of experts on
said topic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Webcomics/Notability_and_inclusion_guidelines
)


- d.