[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's a job?

[phoebe ayers]

On 5/31/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
>
>
> When I saw in my watchlist yesterday that somebody had XfD'd
> [[WP:BJAODN]], I honestly thought it was a bad joke until just now, when
> I bothered to look at the actual details.
>
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bad_Jokes_and_Other_Deleted_Nonsense
>
> Turns out that somebody just went and deleted most of it, and the XfD is
> just for cleaning up the last bits:
>
>     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AN#BJAODN_Deleted



This whole thing makes me incredibly sad. Making a unilateral decision to
delete some of the oldest pages relating to Wikipedia culture, which was
completely ignorable if you didn't like it, and which many people loved?
That's just bad form. Bold, yes, but as someone else said, not even in the
list of the top 100,000 pressing things to do. If someone is that convinced
that they understand and can enforce the GFDL, and has that much energy to
work on copyright problems, why not go after bad mirror sites, or fix bad
merges, or checking text for copyvios, or something else more useful for
fixing up the encyclopedic, public-facing side of the site.

As Herostratus said: "There's such a thing a leaving room in life for some
freaken common sense. Taking away one of the little inside jokes rips at the
heart of an organization, and we are not doing this for the money. Jeffery I
sure wish I had your self-confidence, to be so sure I'm right as to
undertake such a task without first consulting my colleagues."

-- phoebe