On Oct 9, 2006, at 5:10 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Unilateral deletions are performed hundreds of times a month by Wikipedia Admins on the basis of their own judgement. Perhaps I shouldn't find it shocking that some [[troll (Internet)|opportunist]] found it useful take advantage of Danny's high profile in order to play out a little bit of performance art.
Since we're apparently dispensing with civility here, get off your soapbox and engage reality. Any unilateral speedy deletion that went against three AfDs would be overturned in a heartbeat, and you know it. Which is as it should be.
It is unfortunate and uncharacteristic to see you equate the elevation of experienced judgement and consideration over strict policy conformance with a lack of deference to the community.
Yes, because it's certainly not like the community has expressed their opinion on this. Three times.
It appears to me that in this thread we have seen numerous complaints about HOW this was carried out masquerade as complaints about what was done... The reality is that the claim that the deletion was clearly inappropriate can not be supported by fact: no answer was given to the point that we lack articles on the numerous similar devices which have an equal claim of notoriety, nor has our oh so violated community bothered to even write a section on this oh so notable product in the article it was later redirected to.
Yes. Because clearly the lack of other articles on a topic is evidence of something. That is, after all, why we've done away with article creation - since there are no substantial holes in our coverage.
Perhaps our mere colocation on the project like the castaways in my example makes us, by definition, a community. But if that is really the destiny of the English Wikipedia community then it is a failure by my standards... and I hope such an end would be a failure by all of your standards as well.
While I agree with you about the deterioration of the en community, this is a downright stupid issue to try to hijack into this consideration. Danny crossed a line that's important on a topic that is far from a clear case (As evidenced by the fact that three AfDs passed with a vote to keep). That's bad.
-Phil