[WikiEN-l] Deletions snapped up by commercial organizations

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 10:28 AM, Eugene van der Pijll <
eugene at vanderpijll.nl> wrote:

> Ron Ritzman schreef:
> > The guy with the commercial project is not "our buddy". He's someone
> > with a beef against Wikipedia. Nobody here is in cahoots with this
> > guy.
> >
> > He probably gets the articles by monitoring AFD for articles about
> > businesses being considered for deletion and grabbing it before it
> > gets deleted.
>
> No, he requests and receives these articles from admins. See
> http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=16524 .
>
> Nothing wrong with that.
>

Yeah.  Kohs' problems with our no-paid-editing policies, and his repeated
butting his head up against it and griping about WP elsewhere, are a minor
problem (the wedge for a much larger problem, but his actual damage to or
hostility to the Encyclopedia over time has been only marginal).

He's not our friend, but he's also not an enemy in the "out to get us"
sense.

I agree that it's proper to request and receive copies of articles deleted
by normal processes (other than BLP or other sensitive deletions).  Many
admins are open to doing so for anyone who requests a copy of a deleted
article.  Most people who request it are looking to see if they can recreate
an article and fix its problems, but taking the data (under GFDL) and
posting it elsewhere is also "legal".

I don't know if Kohs will end up with any noticable market out of doing
this, but it's not evil.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com