On 6/6/07, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 0, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> scribbled:
"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.