[WikiEN-l] Q regarding notablity and blocking of account.

[Steve Bennett]

On 1/8/08, Ulrich <us at activestocks.de> wrote:
> I am the lead developer of a project called ActiveQuant, which got
> deleted recently. There was some notability discussion about this
> software and i clearly pointed out that delisting ActiveQuant is not
> only unfair but also unjust in my eyes. A very important other library

Probably the first thing you need to understand is we don't even try
for "just" or "fair" decisions. The delete/not delete mechanism is
basically a big, very fuzzy heuristic that tries to provide the best
outcome for our project, by filtering out the least useful articles.

> called QuantLib got delisted, too. The main problem these two projects
> were suffering from is notability.

It's perfectly possible for two similar articles near the threshold of
includability to meet different outcomes at "Articles for Discussion".
That's basically guaranteed under the consensus mechanism.

> Now, as these two projects got deleted, i enforced the same rule
> (missing notability) on other projects and marked them as to be deleted.

Ooh. You don't want to do that. You don't want to be a crusader for an
article that you have a personal stake in. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COI

> Someone with account HU12 therefore initiated a block against my account
> and rolled back my delete requests without knowing that these projects

It probably looked like you were trying to game the system...a bad
idea when you are a newcomer to the system. Best to leave this kind of
thing to established users.

> of course have exactly the same notability issues and must therefore be
> deleted, too.

No. There is no "must". No one can really demand that any article
either be or not be deleted. Don't worry about other articles -
they're not your concern. Unless, of course you want to become an
active participant in Wikipedia.

>  To go even further, he has now removed permission to modify my own talk
> page, as he accuses me to abuse the method to request unblocking. I

Unusual.

> still request unblocking of my account and deletion of these other
> projects (actually most other open source listings on wikipedia suffer

As long as you're still gunning for this deletion, you're unlikely to
get much sympathy.

> Could someone please be so kind and explain to me
> a) why has my delete-request been removed from those other projects,
> although it is perfectly valid

Could you provide some URLs? And why you're so concerned about the
existence of these articles? Is it a case of sour grapes?

> other pages that have missing references or notability problems and why
> has our page (ActiveQuant) been deleted, although there were other

Because it's not your page. It's our page.

> people, not only me, complaining about this delete request. I do value
> the hint from this other guy (can't remember his name right now), that
> once ActiveQuant has reached notability by i.e. a book about it or a
> magazine article as a backening it will have no notablity issues anymore
> and is valid for resubmission! But again, why are other projects that
> have even less text and information to learn from (software related,
> i.e. architectural insight) still listed?

Because Wikipedia is imperfect. Very much so.

Steve