Quoting Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca>ca>:
Philip Sandifer wrote:
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/2007/10/30/wikiwatch-how-did…
Oh look. Our webcomics deletionism has driven off contributors and
hurt the project.
I'm surprised. Are you surprised? I'm surprised.
I saw this back when it first came up and considered writing a posting
here about it, but I decided against it because I figured I'd sound like
a broken record. But I guess that fact itself is kind of significant.
Frankly, I support this boycott. We, as a community, decided to reduce
our support for webcomics articles as much as possible, so it's entirely
reasonable that they, as a community, would decide to reduce their
support for Wikipedia as much as possible. Some editors like to point
out how prominent Wikipedia has become as a reason why it's important to
remove "non-notable" material. Well, here's the flipside of that; a lot
of people notice now when we snub a subject area that they themselves
consider notable.
Up to a point. Many of the webcomics people aren't complaining about the
targeted deletions of notable items (which in any event were almost all
kept or
were recreated after DRVs). The complain to a large extent is that we aren't
keeping almost all Webcomics. Many have complained that anything less than
keeping all webcomics is "censorship", See the relevant Wikinews article -
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikimedia_fundraiser_highlights_webcomic_commun…
and the highly informative comments thread-
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Comments:Wikimedia_fundraiser_highlights_webcom…
That's not to say that parts of their response aren't unreasonable. Users did
not restrict themselves to targeting merely the problematic
materialthere was a
lot of collateral damage, and we could have been much more diplomatic about
everything. However, we should not lose sight that most of the articles
deleted
did not belong on Wikipedia and that the elements of the webcomics community
that are unhappy with us are often parts that are unhappy because the loss of
Wikipedia articles hurts either their egos or livelyhood.
Finally, note that many prominent webcomics are still on very good
terms with us
despite this supposed backlash. For example, XKCD continues to have positive
Wikipedia themed humor (indeed I doubt that the author Randall Munroe(who
incidentally has been a model Wikipedian where COI and related issues are
concerned) is even aware of this blowup).
http://www.achewood.com/
http://www.dieselsweeties.com/ http://www.fetusx.com/
http://www.pvponline.com/about are all notable webcomics which go so
far as to
link to their relevant Wikipedia articles (and if I'm not mistaken PvP
was even
one of the webcomics that got deleted at one point).
Overall, this matter has been blown out of proportion
I for one am far more concerned about pissing off Teresa Nielsen Hayden
and Cory
Doctorow. They are our natural constituency. But as far as I'm aware no one
involved in that incident has even tried to apologize to Hayden.