[WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist

[Ian Woollard]

On 25/07/2009, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> My point is that despite media publicity about "deletionists" and
> people on the fringes of Wikipedia getting annoyed at not being
> considered article-worthy ... we still include a wider range of stuff
> than (I think) any general encyclopedia ever before us, and no-one can
> seriously question that. And we do so to actual standards.

If you really want WTF:

I recently saw the deletion review of the article '-graphy' which was
up for deletion because the article name violated MOS (the title is
not a noun or verb or phrase), and because it's a pure list of words,
constructed on a lexical rule, which *is* actually in the wiktionary-
wiktionary welcomes suffixes and prefixes with open arms as nearly all
dictionaries do.

In other words, this is a real, bona fide dictionary definition in the
encyclopedia. A real dicdef, as opposed to all those articles that
haven't 'dun enuf' to be encyclopedic.

It was up for review once before, and although IMO the review seems to
have been at best, no consensus, it rated a firm KEEP that time by the
closing admin... odd...

Anyway for the second review the process gyrations they went through
this time to avoid the deletion involved renaming it to 'Glossary of
graphies' during the review, and then claiming that that made it OK,
even though 'graphies' isn't a word either. I'm pretty sure that a
glossary that contains words picked based entirely on their word
endings is the weirdest glossary in history; they're supposed to be
things you refer to when reading. But whatever.

The result of the review was, intriguingly, keep again, not even no
consensus, after a voting extension which gave only a couple more
votes and which included a vote for keep by an administrator who cast
aspersions on the laziness of the user calling for AFD for not
figuring out a way to save the article!!!!

After all that tiresome AFD business was completed it was of course
renamed straight back to -graphy again...

> - d.

-- 
-Ian Woollard

"All the world's a stage... but you'll grow out of it eventually."