[WikiEN-l] A Day in the Life of an Article

[Bryan Derksen]

fredbaud at waterwiki.info wrote:
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: geni [mailto:geniice at gmail.com]
>> Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 11:02 PM
>> To: 'English Wikipedia'
>> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] A Day in the Life of an Article
> You
>> don't write articles shorter than a paragraph say 3-4 lines. There was
>> a reason substubs were abolished. Anyone who gets through RFA will
>> know this instinctively.
> 
>> geni
> 
> Why on earth would you make such ridiculous rules? Just self-destructiveness?

It's not just shortness that seems to trigger this sort of behavior.
Back in June I dipped my toes into Special:Newpages, just to see what it
was like since I'd mentioned it to others. I grabbed a few brand new
articles to monitor and maybe work on. One of them was a very extensive
article on a company that appeared to have been written in an advertisey
tone, by a user whose username suggested affiliation with the company.
Naturally, it got speedily deleted a couple of times. The logo of the
company was also deleted as orphaned fair use.

The initial author meant well, he was simply a little clueless about
Wikipedia's content standards and COI guidelines. He posted numerous
plaintive queries on his own user talk page asking how he could go about
fixing the article to prevent its deletion and pointing out that other
similar-sized companies in the same field had articles, but nobody
seemed to be paying much attention to what he was saying. I gave him
some advice and he tried addressing some of the issues but it didn't
stop the deletions. He was eventually blocked indefinitely due to his
username violating policy.

I waited a few days for the deletion storm to pass and attention to
wander, then as quickly as I could I restored the history and trimmed
out the advertising speak myself. The article has sat completely
unmolested since then, apparently a perfectly fine article on a
perfectly fine subject. It took me _four minutes_ to fix it up nicely
according to the timestamps. There must be umpteen thousands of such
articles sitting in the deleted versions bin, probably never to be
rescued. It's very disheartening.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 250 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20070917/34a1102a/attachment.pgp