[WikiEN-l] I'm disappointed in Wikipedia.

[John Lee]

On 6/9/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
>
> No, not for any of the stuff I'm getting into fights about lately,
> like cliques and BADSITES.  But for one of its article deletions.
>
> You see, I was working on edits to one of my personal websites, in
> this case one about e-mail formatting and related technical and
> cultural issues ( http://mailformat.dan.info/ ).  I decided, in the
> course of talking about forwarded messages, to refer to the concept
> of "glurge", which is the sort of sickeningly-sweet motivational
> stuff (Norman Vincent Peale - ish) that gets regularly forwarded
> around the net.  Usually when I do something like that, I like to
> stick in an external link to some place that describes what I'm
> talking about, and lately Wikipedia is almost always my first choice
> to try to find one.  Unfortunately, it turns out that the Wikipedia
> article on "glurge" has been deleted:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Glurge
>
> Thus, I had to go to Snopes instead to find a link to the concept.
>
> Wikipedia is often at its best as a place to find balanced, useful
> references about a variety of subcultural phenomena, Internet memes,
> and the like.  Why should we cut off our nose by deleting them?


As I anticipated, the only reason the article was deleted was a lack of
sources. That's perfectly fine.

What's not perfectly fine is how lazy people are when it comes to looking
for sources. I often see quotations tagged with {{fact}} that have sources
readily available on Google (I just select a random phrase from the quote,
plug it in, and the search results nearly always yield something useful).

Likewise, http://www.google.com/search?q=Glurge yields more than enough
sources on the phrase's etymology (though that's more for Wiktionary) and
background. Is it really that hard to Google something?

Johnleemk