On 6/9/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
No, not for any of the stuff I'm getting into fights about lately, like cliques and BADSITES. But for one of its article deletions.
You see, I was working on edits to one of my personal websites, in this case one about e-mail formatting and related technical and cultural issues ( http://mailformat.dan.info/ ). I decided, in the course of talking about forwarded messages, to refer to the concept of "glurge", which is the sort of sickeningly-sweet motivational stuff (Norman Vincent Peale - ish) that gets regularly forwarded around the net. Usually when I do something like that, I like to stick in an external link to some place that describes what I'm talking about, and lately Wikipedia is almost always my first choice to try to find one. Unfortunately, it turns out that the Wikipedia article on "glurge" has been deleted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Glurge
Thus, I had to go to Snopes instead to find a link to the concept.
Wikipedia is often at its best as a place to find balanced, useful references about a variety of subcultural phenomena, Internet memes, and the like. Why should we cut off our nose by deleting them?
As I anticipated, the only reason the article was deleted was a lack of sources. That's perfectly fine.
What's not perfectly fine is how lazy people are when it comes to looking for sources. I often see quotations tagged with {{fact}} that have sources readily available on Google (I just select a random phrase from the quote, plug it in, and the search results nearly always yield something useful).
Likewise, http://www.google.com/search?q=Glurge yields more than enough sources on the phrase's etymology (though that's more for Wiktionary) and background. Is it really that hard to Google something?
Johnleemk