A while ago I came across a Wikipedia page that had compiled the genealogy of the entire Taft family. I just went to look something up on it, trying to see how Taft Broadcasting fit into there, and I see that at the beginning of March it was “speedy” deleted as “blatant advertising.” Jesuswhatthefuck! Since when is it considered a public service to delete information that people find useful?
Advertising for what? A Taft biography?
I have no idea. It was basically a family tree with notes on the significant accomplishments of the prominent Tafts. So far as I remember there was no advertising on it.
Everything deleted is still there. Just click the History tab and roll back to the version you want to see.
Don’t worry, acsenray, I found this nifty image for your family album.
The jokers at it again?
So far as I can tell, it’s not. Apparently when an article is actually deleted, it’s gone, baby, gone. It’s not just like editing the content of an article.
It happens that I just noticed a deletion half an hour ago.
Very very occasionnaly, I’ve made very minor modifications to Wikipedia articles (like correcting a faulty translation or similar stuff). For some reason, I looked up the articles I had corrected. One of them was an article about a small french village whose only claim to fame is the attribution of an Ignobel prize to a scout organization whose members had damaged prehistoric cave paintings there.
All references to the scouts damaging the paintings had been removed (even though the Ignobel prize was the only reason why the article had been created), with the mention “removed unsourced scout reference”. I looked up, and noticed that the corrector was apparently mostly (or only) writing articles about the scouts.
I wasn’t particularily pissed off but I couldnt help thinking that it was deleted only because it painted negatively a scout organization.
That said, this is unavoidable, given the nature of Wikipedia.
I asked a Wikipedia admin about this. Here was the response:
Nothing to add, I just wanted to say that SisterCoyote’s reason for editing is pure gold.
Why, thank you.
Great response trom Wikipedia! I had a feeling that hard deletion is very rare, if it’s an error then the text would be irrecoverable.
And to err is human …
SisterCoyote, that is absolutely amazing! I never once thought that my grousing here would actually result in something.
(Now I wish I had been complaining about something important. Can I put you through to my mortgage broker? 
)
As long as were on the subject of senseless deletions, can anyone tell me why the people pages were deleted? There used to be a simple alphabetical listing (along with their nationality, professions, and years they were alive) of all of the people who had biographical articles about them with links to the articles. It was a handy resource when you weren’t sure of a person’s exact name - as long as you had an approximate spelling of their last name, you could look them up.
As far as I can tell, all of these pages have been deleted. What possible reason did the termites give for that? Did they decide an index was too uncyclopediac? Too biocentric? Did they figure that the index was only 95% complete and it made more sense to delete it rather than complete it? Or did seeing a list of people who were more famous than them fill them with a senseless rage over society’s refusal to acknowledge than the universe revolved around them?
Trust me on this: I’m the last person you want trying to help you with your finances. :eek:
Deletions are very common, actually. Scores of crap articles are started every day: “Joey P. Alexander” whose main accomplishment is attending Hubert H. Humphrey high school and getting with all the chicks, “Unlimited Technologies, Ltd.” which is bringing the problem solving solutions of tomorrow to the consumers of today, and “Sam is a homofag”, for some examples.
Outright deletions of established articles are more rare, but do happen from time to time. There’s a deletion process that is usually gone through beforehand (and not the “speedy deletion” that was used here).
I asked, but my contact* may not know the answer.
*hee. My contact. I feel all big and important and stuff.
It seems reasonable to delete an article with absolutely no sources outside of a single web site run by a single person.
Wikipedia has pretty lax policies, but it does have policies. “If no reliable, third-party (in relation to the subject) sources can be found for an article topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it.”
They certainly have the right to enforce their own rules.
Some Wikipedia policies are just dumb. I’ve contributed a considerable amount to an article on a singer with a four octave range. This is the sort of thing that is tossed around quite freely, to the point that people have claimed that Mariah Carey has a “seven octave range”. So I actually verified the singers highest and lowest recorded notes by verifying the frequency of each note. Now I’m arguing the inclusion of this information with the sort of Wiki-Lawyer type who delights in pointing out that this is verboten “original research”. Apparently the cause of an encyclopedia is better suited by external, unverified sources rather than proof of facts.