[WikiEN-l] Viral swarming teenage vanity spam

[Erik Moeller]

On 7/4/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This is over the top just for sheer lack of substance,
> and the fact that it passed an AFD with some help from
> a apparently clueness newbie contingent, unencumbered
> by any corrective measures for fostering founding
> philosophy.

Even if you subtract the newbies, it's fairly obvious that there is no
consensus to delete. I think the page should be kept for now, but this
is a special case of WP:MEME where the meme is still very young and
it's hard to determine how ephemeral it will be.

There's nothing wrong with doing another AfD two or three months from
now. In the case of [[Brian Peppers]], Jimmy tried an article creation
moratorium as an alternative approach. Peppers, however, is another
special case where human dignity is concerned. I see no harm in
keeping a verifiable, limited page about [[Eon8]] for the time being.
I am very wary of viral marketing crap, but this seems to be a
harmless experiment without a clear commercial motive.

If someone is looking for a nice wiki idea to launch, I suspect a
"MemeWatch" wiki that explicitly allows original research would do
rather well, and we could point many of the forum people who keep
coming up in cases like that in this direction.

Applying our existing policies seems more important to me than keeping
the encyclopedia free of "trivial" content. With 1.2 million articles,
including a page dedicated to anthropomorphized operating systems
([[List of OS-tans]]) and an entire category of lists of fictional
animals, that strikes me as a rather quixotic enterprise.

Erik