Quoting Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca:
Philip Sandifer wrote:
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/2007/10/30/wikiwatch-how-did-...
Oh look. Our webcomics deletionism has driven off contributors and hurt the project.
I'm surprised. Are you surprised? I'm surprised.
I saw this back when it first came up and considered writing a posting here about it, but I decided against it because I figured I'd sound like a broken record. But I guess that fact itself is kind of significant.
Frankly, I support this boycott. We, as a community, decided to reduce our support for webcomics articles as much as possible, so it's entirely reasonable that they, as a community, would decide to reduce their support for Wikipedia as much as possible. Some editors like to point out how prominent Wikipedia has become as a reason why it's important to remove "non-notable" material. Well, here's the flipside of that; a lot of people notice now when we snub a subject area that they themselves consider notable.
Up to a point. Many of the webcomics people aren't complaining about the targeted deletions of notable items (which in any event were almost all kept or were recreated after DRVs). The complain to a large extent is that we aren't keeping almost all Webcomics. Many have complained that anything less than keeping all webcomics is "censorship", See the relevant Wikinews article - http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikimedia_fundraiser_highlights_webcomic_communi... and the highly informative comments thread- http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Comments:Wikimedia_fundraiser_highlights_webcomi...
That's not to say that parts of their response aren't unreasonable. Users did not restrict themselves to targeting merely the problematic materialthere was a lot of collateral damage, and we could have been much more diplomatic about everything. However, we should not lose sight that most of the articles deleted did not belong on Wikipedia and that the elements of the webcomics community that are unhappy with us are often parts that are unhappy because the loss of Wikipedia articles hurts either their egos or livelyhood.
Finally, note that many prominent webcomics are still on very good terms with us despite this supposed backlash. For example, XKCD continues to have positive Wikipedia themed humor (indeed I doubt that the author Randall Munroe(who incidentally has been a model Wikipedian where COI and related issues are concerned) is even aware of this blowup). http://www.achewood.com/ http://www.dieselsweeties.com/ http://www.fetusx.com/ http://www.pvponline.com/about are all notable webcomics which go so far as to link to their relevant Wikipedia articles (and if I'm not mistaken PvP was even one of the webcomics that got deleted at one point).
Overall, this matter has been blown out of proportion I for one am far more concerned about pissing off Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Cory Doctorow. They are our natural constituency. But as far as I'm aware no one involved in that incident has even tried to apologize to Hayden.