J.F. de Wolff wrote:
I agree with Phil's observation, but it's not just the [[profanity|****]] deletionists that are to blame. There are honestly too many people so hungry for attention that they continuously seek to make Wikipedia aware of their unnotability. These characters are an undesired effect of being completely open, and cause pollution of good material with their own vanity. It is them we should blame to a large degree for our failure to distinguish between bona fide and shockingly unnotable.
When it comes to webcomics, it is extremely hard (for a non-insider) to make a judgment between notable and non-notable, which is exactly the point in having guidelines. I know this is elitist, but in these matters an uninformed opinion is a potentially destructive one.
Don't forget, we only deleted the articles *about* the comics, not the comics themselves...
People (especially those who frequent a particularly evil site which I won't name, but whose community has created their own particularly unfunny wiki - people on #wikipedia, you might know who I mean) often fail to see this fact, saying "don't delete my pride and joy! this thing really exists! save my baby" - and yet they fail to realise the key issue at stake:
Wikipedia is a general purpose encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is *not* the internet. You can't put whatever you want to on it. We have guidlines. We have standards. We don't include every single piece of fancruft minutae about everything (although sometimes I wonder about that). We are not the place to advertise your newest book/TV show/movie/religion/invention, or yourself.
Wikipedia stores articles about things. It does not store the things themselves. If something has become notable outside of whatever community associated with it (unless that community is sufficiently large), it is possibly deserving of an article about it.
If, however, you decide "I want people to love me! I will go make a website about $(randomtopic) and write about it on Wikipedia!", you are sore out of luck.
Wikipedia does not exist to inflate your precious little ego.
I am a member of the Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgements About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are In Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn't Mean They are Deletionist.
When someone says on VFD/AFD/Whatever it's called now "non-notable", they mean:
"The subject of this particular article is not notable outside of it's own community to warrant an article of its own."
Now if the webcomics community feels wronged by the Wikipedia community, I am sorry. But we cannot help it if we find an article on our encyclopedia which fails our notability guidlines. It is not the job of Wikipedia, *and never will be*, to make things notable.
We are here to document the state of things, nothing more. That is the essence of NPOV, the policy which (along with Freedom of content) Wikipedia is founded upon.