[WikiEN-l] Deletionism fails to serve the readers

[The Cunctator]

On 6/6/07, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On  0, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> scribbled:
> > http://www.sfbg.com/printable_entry.php?entry_id=3803
> >
> > - d.
>
> "And then, while I was at it, I re-created another entry recently deleted
> for not being notable enough — that of Sonia Greene, a pulp fiction writer
> and publisher of the 1920s who was briefly married to H.P. Lovecraft. Of
> all the insulting things to have happen, her entry had been erased, and
> people searching for her were redirected to an entry on Lovecraft. How's
> that for you, future scholars? Looking for information about a minor pulp
> fiction writer? Too bad she's not notable — but we can redirect you to an
> entry on a guy she was married to for two years. (A guy, I might add, who
> pissed her off so much that she burned all his letters when they divorced.)
> Yuck."
>
> Dammit, I *hate* it when people mis-characterize the [[Sonia Greene]]
> thing. Like I told the Wired guy as well, Valrith didn't blank and redirect
> to H. P. Lovecraft because Sonia wasn't notable, he did it because the
> entire article was a tissue of multiple copyvios and there wasn't any
> material to be preserved or anything else that could be done (neither he nor
> I were Greene experts).



Also there is the fact that blanking and redirecting is a lot different than
deleting in Wikipedia norms. You'll generally get a lot less grief undoing a
redirect than a deletion. Of course it's nicer to drop a line to the
contributor first, but that's sometimes a fool's errand with people who
haven't logged in.