-----Original Message----- From: geni [mailto:geniice@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 11:02 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] A Day in the Life of an Article
You
don't write articles shorter than a paragraph say 3-4 lines. There was a reason substubs were abolished. Anyone who gets through RFA will know this instinctively.
geni
Why on earth would you make such ridiculous rules? Just self-destructiveness?
Fred
On 18/09/2007, fredbaud@waterwiki.info fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
Why on earth would you make such ridiculous rules? Just self-destructiveness?
Fred
Not ridiculous. Simply accepted that at any given time there should be a version of the article either in it's present form or in it's history that could surivive the speedy deletion criteria. Trying to build in delays results in a mess.
fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: geni [mailto:geniice@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 11:02 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] A Day in the Life of an Article
You
don't write articles shorter than a paragraph say 3-4 lines. There was a reason substubs were abolished. Anyone who gets through RFA will know this instinctively.
geni
Why on earth would you make such ridiculous rules? Just self-destructiveness?
It's not just shortness that seems to trigger this sort of behavior. Back in June I dipped my toes into Special:Newpages, just to see what it was like since I'd mentioned it to others. I grabbed a few brand new articles to monitor and maybe work on. One of them was a very extensive article on a company that appeared to have been written in an advertisey tone, by a user whose username suggested affiliation with the company. Naturally, it got speedily deleted a couple of times. The logo of the company was also deleted as orphaned fair use.
The initial author meant well, he was simply a little clueless about Wikipedia's content standards and COI guidelines. He posted numerous plaintive queries on his own user talk page asking how he could go about fixing the article to prevent its deletion and pointing out that other similar-sized companies in the same field had articles, but nobody seemed to be paying much attention to what he was saying. I gave him some advice and he tried addressing some of the issues but it didn't stop the deletions. He was eventually blocked indefinitely due to his username violating policy.
I waited a few days for the deletion storm to pass and attention to wander, then as quickly as I could I restored the history and trimmed out the advertising speak myself. The article has sat completely unmolested since then, apparently a perfectly fine article on a perfectly fine subject. It took me _four minutes_ to fix it up nicely according to the timestamps. There must be umpteen thousands of such articles sitting in the deleted versions bin, probably never to be rescued. It's very disheartening.