On 7/5/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Going down the VFD page it would appear that a large number, if not a majority, of the 'keep' voters have less than 50 article edits. Some have no article edits at all.
First of all, I strongly advocate quickly semi-protecting AfDs in cases like this to avoid too much newbie noise. Newbies can still comment on the talk page.
The high level of newbie participation is exactly the problem with articles like this. When an AfD has a very large number of newbies defending the article (and a large amount of OR and speculative edits before then), admins tend to interpret all "Keep" arguments as part of the same newbie reaction. This leads to the interesting phenomenon that an article may be more likely to be deleted if there's substantial outside interest in it.
Note that I argued "Weak keep". It's not a very popular or interesting website -- hardly worth crying over -- but it did receive coverage in a newspaper with over half a million readers, and on several popular websites, including Slashdot, which has a paid editorial staff and more traffic than Wired. Ironically, Wikipedia has a very strong emotional bias against blogs and other new types of Internet publications.
As a freelance journalist, I find that somewhat concerning. I have written for newspapers with large circulations, and I know that fact-checking before deadlines is often minimal. Several of the articles I wrote for print publications have been made considerably worse by the editorial staff (i.e. obvious factual and grammatical errors introduced).
It is not wise to believe that something magically becomes notable the moment some print journalist for the NYT cares about, and it magically becomes irrelevant the moment the "blogosphere" reports about it. We need fair and reasonable standards of notability which take into account the fact that our media landscape is radically transforming.
Under a regular AfD, this "Eon8" site would probably have closely passed WP:WEB (which is a guideline anyway), as many web comics, borderline notable websites, memes, and so on do. We should not have kept it because many confused teenagers thought they were witness to an important event. But we should also not have deleted for that same reason. Notability should be independent of outside interest.
Erik