[WikiEN-l] Viral swarming teenage vanity spam

[Gregory Maxwell]

Erik wrote:
>The page was now deleted, in spite of no consensus, and in spite of a
>very large amount of blog coverage and a newspaper report in Politiken
>about it. Whether you like it or not (and I don't), it does meet the
>WP:WEB criteria. This is part of a worrying and growing trend among
>admins to do whatever they feel like when they close an AfD.
>Overriding community opinion should only be done in exceptional
>circumstances and with clear documentation of one's reasoning, which
>can then be taken into policy discussions. Otherwise you end up with
>completely arbitrary enforcement, and an ever growing tension between
>admins and regular users.

Is every random spammer who hits 'edit' automatically a member of the
'community'?

Why would we give automatic suffrage to folks who have not yet
demonstrated a significant degree of support or even understanding of
the goals of the project?

Why do I ask?
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.

Almost any form of edit count or tenure weighing would leave this a
clear consensus for delete. Even more importantly, the arguments on
the delete side are far more compelling in my view: for example,
Thatcher131's observation that "eon8 gets one hit on Google News and
one hit on Lexis/Nexis; both are blog-related hits based solely on the
claims of the website itself". With that in mind, how can you claim
that the article isn't an attempt to spread an idea as opposed to
merely documenting already popular idea?

This is not the clear cut case of ignoring consensus that you make it out to be.

Erik wrote:
[snip]
>You need to stop worrying and learn to love the wiki.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not an experiment is extreme democracy.
Wiki is a wonderful tool, but it's just that... A tool. Not an end
goal. That we are a Wiki does not excuse us from conventional
obligations like quality.