On 6/6/07, Annalee Newitz annalee@techsploitation.com wrote:
Who is this "Wired guy" you told? I'm the person who wrote about Sonia Greene on Wired. Are you talking about me?
If the problem was copyvio, then why were readers redirected to H.P. Lovecraft? Shouldn't the article have just have been left blank? I remain convinced that there's something a little heinous about blanking out a writer's page and then redirecting people to the page of a guy she was married to for two years.
Redirects are commonly used to handle topics that don't (yet) merit their own page but are covered somewhere else.
They're a bit overused, but the Sonia Greene article was not deleted. Redirects are almost invariably considered preferable to blank entries.
For a number of what I hope should be obvious reasons, many people don't like leaving blank entries on Wikipedia.
I sympathize with your preference for blank pages, being something of an atomist as opposed to an agglomerationist, but it's just not the Wikipedia way.
Think of it this way: if you found copyvio problems in the page of
William Wordsworth, would you blank it and redirect readers to the page of his sister Dorothy Wordsworth?
If Dorothy Wordsworth were considerably more famous than William Wordsworth, then yes.
You seem to be seeing this through a gender-relations lens. I hope I'm incorrect.
Please believe me; I've been through battles about whether or not less-famous people should get their own entries or just exist as redirects. As is standard on the internets, you're not discovering a new issue. It's been hashed out.
I would have been more irked if content had been deleted, and I LOVE supporters fighting the system, but you seem to have been having some classic newbie troubles.
Which implies that the help system/documentation should be better. I certainly am willing to believe that.