On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 5:58 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Gwern Branwen wrote:
The [[dwm]] deletion discussion has caught the interest of some of the more nerdy online communities:
- http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b8s29/the_wikipedia_deletionist...
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1163884
It's interesting to see the general levels of disgust and how few current editors there are in comparison to former, and read the dislike of WP:N.
As usual, one has to sift the arguments. Why aren't blogs included under RS? That would be because they are generally unreliable? Why does a snowboarding slalom event not have its own article? That would be because no one has started one, I guess. Why does someone who left in 2006 still bring it up? Elephant's memory for grudges, I suppose.
4 years is hardly extraordinary. What events would someone who left because of something in 2006 cite other than it? 'Oh, I left in 2006 and haven't contributed since, but an excellent example of what I mean was the deletion discussion for [[foo]] in 2008; of course, I don't know anything about it since I wasn't contributing as I said, but you see what I mean.'
Oh yes, and what Carcharoth said about FLOSS history needing the secondary sources: if "they" don't write the history, it isn't just WP coverage that suffers, but the whole documentation, especially if the primary sources are emails, perishable web pages, and suchlike.
Charles
So basically, 'if you guys choose to use modern media like wikis and blogs, and not dead tree formats, then don't cry about your articles being deleted - it's all *your* fault! Cut your hair, you damn hippies!'