G'day Gwern,
Dammit, I *hate* it when people mis-characterize the [[Sonia Greene]] thing. Like I told the Wired guy as well, Valrith didn't blank and redirect to H. P. Lovecraft because Sonia wasn't notable, he did it because the entire article was a tissue of multiple copyvios and there wasn't any material to be preserved or anything else that could be done (neither he nor I were Greene experts).
When faced with a poor article, I tend to prefer it to be a copyvio than an original but dodgy work. Why?
Because if it's a copyright violation, then we have ready-made sources for rewriting! Yay! Of course, many people couldn't be bothered with that sort of thing, not when there's inappropriate speedies to tag and good edits to revert ...