On 22 Feb 2006 at 06:40, "Daniel P. B. Smith" wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
- It's still free, isn't it?
That word has a number of different senses, some of which apply to Wikipedia and some that don't. It can be accessed at no charge, but people using it are not free to do things that its admins and Jimbo don't allow them to do.
- Wikipedia is still an encyclopedia, isn't it? Surely you can have
an encyclopedia without an article on Brian Peppers in it. Many other encyclopedias get by without such an article.
Yes, I wouldn't expect the Encyclopedia of 18th Century French Revolutionaries to include such an article, nor the Encyclopedia of Star Wars Planets. An Encyclopedia of Internet Memes, on the other hand, might well have such an entry. So the question then becomes just what sort of encyclopedia is Wikipedia.
- Anyone can still edit Wikipedia, can't they?
Other than the people who are banned, anyway.
- If this deletion was made "unilaterally" then who are the twenty
or so other sysops who also deleted the page? Are they all Jimbo's sockpuppets?
They're one side of an edit war, obviously, with those who undeleted or recreated it on the other side.
Jimbo ended up taking sides in this war, something he's been doing more often lately, and perhaps necessarily, given the apparent increasing inability of the community to reach stable consensuses (consensi?) by itself.