[WikiEN-l] Viral swarming teenage vanity spam

[Erik Moeller]

On 7/5/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Going down the VFD page it would appear that a large number, if not a
> majority, of the 'keep' voters have less than 50 article edits. Some
> have no article edits at all.

First of all, I strongly advocate quickly semi-protecting AfDs in
cases like this to avoid too much newbie noise. Newbies can still
comment on the talk page.

The high level of newbie participation is exactly the problem with
articles like this. When an AfD has a very large number of newbies
defending the article (and a large amount of OR and speculative edits
before then), admins tend to interpret all "Keep" arguments as part of
the same newbie reaction. This leads to the interesting phenomenon
that an article may be more likely to be deleted if there's
substantial outside interest in it.

Note that I argued "Weak keep". It's not a very popular or interesting
website -- hardly worth crying over -- but it did receive coverage in
a newspaper with over half a million readers, and on several popular
websites, including Slashdot, which has a paid editorial staff and
more traffic than Wired. Ironically, Wikipedia has a very strong
emotional bias against blogs and other new types of Internet
publications.

As a freelance journalist, I find that somewhat concerning. I have
written for newspapers with large circulations, and I know that
fact-checking before deadlines is often minimal. Several of the
articles I wrote for print publications have been made considerably
worse by the editorial staff (i.e. obvious factual and grammatical
errors introduced).

It is not wise to believe that something magically becomes notable the
moment some print journalist for the NYT cares about, and it magically
becomes irrelevant the moment the "blogosphere" reports about it. We
need fair and reasonable standards of notability which take into
account the fact that our media landscape is radically transforming.

Under a regular AfD, this "Eon8" site would probably have closely
passed WP:WEB (which is a guideline anyway),  as many web comics,
borderline notable websites, memes, and so on do. We should not have
kept it because many confused teenagers thought they were witness to
an important event. But we should also not have deleted for that same
reason. Notability should be independent of outside interest.

Erik