Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
<snip>
What really worries me is the bad precedent this sets.
The (very condensed)
facts are:
1) This article survived its last AfD. Some people voted delete, but
it survived.
2) A short time later, a phony email was sent to wikipedia by someone
*claiming* to be a relative of Brian Pepper. The article was immediately
deleted. It was later shown that this almost undoubtedly was not sent
by a relative, but by someone sending fake notes to Wikipedia and to
other sites.
3) DR, AFD, mailing list arguments, wheel warring, and finally a deus
ex machina ends with the article, for all practical purposes, being
even more deleted than at the end of step 2.
I know there is a lot of middle stuff in part 3, and the arguments expanded
well beyond the legal worries raised in 2 (although quite a few people
calling for deletion continued to cite them), but it is really disheartening
to to note that, in effect, a prankster just succeeded in having an article
removed from Wikipedia.
The potential for damage is greater than the amount of information we
have lost. If someone really wants to find out about the guy, they can
use Google. I see this as a page which if it were recreated, would most
likely have to be permanantly protected to prevent the reinsertion of
the material which caused it's removal in the first place.
--
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