[WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia and the poison of procedural literalism

[Enchantress of Florence]

You'd be surprised on just how close to an accurate prediction this
was. The article about one of the most prominent lawyers in the USA,
who led the civil prosecutions of Boesky and Milken, was deleted after
next to no discussion, over the objections of my husband (who pointed
out hundreds of news citations verifing both the notability of the
individual and the accuracy of the article (nearly ne hundred from the
New York Times alone).

The administrator who closed the discussion shortly after my husband
posted responded by not only dismissing his points (even though no one
else actually made a substantive argument), but launched into a
gratuitous personal attack on him as deceptive, and falsely
characterized the references he provided; then, after my husband gave
a restrained (if rather annoyed) response, refused to provide any
substantive response, and castigated him for incivility and personal
attacks for, among other things. "impugning" the administrator's
"reasoning." Then one of the admin's began posting rather rude
messages on his talk page.

And that about sums thing up for Wikipedian discussion these days.
It's uncivil and insulting to point out that someone has made a flawed
argument.  It's uncivil and a personal attack to point out that an
administrator has made obvious factual errors.

I doubt you'll see my husband editing any more. He'd amused himself by
actually cleaning the garbage out of various biographies of living
people, bu got little out of it but harassment, three increasingly
nasty rounds of it.

But so it goes. I told him when he began devoting time to Wikipedia
that he'd soon enough have the experience made unpleasant by a
thin-skinned, poorly informed, opinionated soul who viewed expertise
and competence with hostility, and he was.  So it goes.

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

In a recent discussion on the Wiki someone made a proposal which began
"In the case of biographies of living people, where a number of
editors have expressed the opinion either (...)".
One of the outspoken critics of the general class of proposal began
his retort "First, what is 'a number'? As a mathematician I'll tell
you that 0 is a number."

Now, I didn't particularly support this proposal either, ... but I'm
not about to argue that zero users fits the proposed criteria.  In the
same general set of proposals there were a couple of people earnestly
arguging that some change to AfD closure procedure could be expected
to result in the deletion of [[George W. Bush]]  and [[Bill Clinton]].