On 6/6/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
On 0, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com scribbled:
http://www.sfbg.com/printable_entry.php?entry_id=3803
- d.
"And then, while I was at it, I re-created another entry recently deleted for not being notable enough — that of Sonia Greene, a pulp fiction writer and publisher of the 1920s who was briefly married to H.P. Lovecraft. Of all the insulting things to have happen, her entry had been erased, and people searching for her were redirected to an entry on Lovecraft. How's that for you, future scholars? Looking for information about a minor pulp fiction writer? Too bad she's not notable — but we can redirect you to an entry on a guy she was married to for two years. (A guy, I might add, who pissed her off so much that she burned all his letters when they divorced.) Yuck."
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).
Also there is the fact that blanking and redirecting is a lot different than deleting in Wikipedia norms. You'll generally get a lot less grief undoing a redirect than a deletion. Of course it's nicer to drop a line to the contributor first, but that's sometimes a fool's errand with people who haven't logged in.