Look how far removed we are from Wikipedia and see how much tension is arising. I used to be more involved in Wikipedia than I am now, but I’ve made a decision to reduce my involvement because really, the principal consequence of “getting involved” in Wikipedia is aggravation. It’s simply not worth it to wade into battles over content.
Here you have a cabal of Wikipedia editors dedicated to deleting whatever category of article is currently bugging them. How many times can one go up against this?
Here you have a cabal of Wikipedia editors who are really into Tolkien and are going to vigorously defend a minute word-for-word documentation of everything Tolkien ever wrote about. So all that Tolkien stuff is going to stay in.
And, face it, when a person goes through the time and effort to write an article or to research sources or whatever, he or she is going to have some emotional attachment to it. That’s natural. Personally, I like it when someone takes an article and improves it and expands it. But if there’s a danger of the hatchet coming down in the form of aggressive deletion monkeys, then why should I put my time and mental equanimity on the line? I’m a professional writer and editor. I get paid to do this stuff. I’m less willing to write and edit articles on a voluntary basis when those contributions aren’t welcome.
So, I don’t see it as worth my while to try to jump through the hoops to save this one article that I occasionally find useful to look at. Instead, I’m going to download it to my computer so when I want to look it up, I’ll have it. I appreciate the effort you’ve taken, SisterCoyote, in recovering that information, and now that I have it, I’m going to keep it. But I’m not going to put forth any significant effort in what I think I’m justified in believing will be an ultimately futile attempt to save the page from further “attacks” as the Wikipedia admin put it.
And, yet, if we don’t remember our past FUBARs, we’re doomed to repeat them. Some months ago, the Scouts stumbled across some previously unknown rock paintings in Utah, IIRC, they very carefully erased all evidence of their presence (so as not to encourage passersby from looking), wrote down the GPS coordinates of where the paintings, and then gave the information to archeologists. I can’t help but think that the mistakes at Lascaux influenced their actions.
I’m finding myself caught up in some deletion wars as of late. Since 1994, I’ve been running a Web site that is considered authoritative in its field; it’s not some insignificant fly-by-night Geocities page or commercial site.
ALL of the links to my site from related articles were deleted by some administrator, as spam. I’ll admit I added a couple, but like I said, it’s not as if I’m running some obscure or for-profit site; my site comes up second or third in a Google search for the profession’s name.m Meanwhile, links to a rival commercial site, many of which were added by the owner of that site, remain intact. Why aren’t they deleted? The response from the administrator was akin to “we’re talking about you, not them.” They also accused me of posting only links to my site, when it wasn’t the case.
All of this has soured me on the Wikipedia experience. No credit for editing pages over the past few years, just accusations of being a spammer.
There are processes in place, including arbitration, where if you’re really cheesed about this you can bring it to the attention of the community. I haven’t been involved in this sort of dispute but if you post {{helpme}} to your talk page and a request for advice on how to try to resolve the dispute, someone more knowledgable about the procedure can point you in the right direction.
But a process like this is long and complicated. The problem is that deleters find it easy to just keep hitting over and over again. I once likened it to a race between people trying to build houses and people trying to destroy houses. It takes months of skilled labor by dozens of people to build a single house. But one idiot with a book of matches can burn down twenty houses in a single hour.
I was speaking of the specific case under discussion, which was that a single admin went in and (probably bot-assisted) deleted all of elmwood’s links as spam. Since it’s a conflict between a single editor and a single admin, it can probably be resolved fairly quickly and the admin, if found to be in error, can restore the links.
The people who manage different parts of Wikipedia refuse to communicate with mere humans. I first tried to contact the person or person who manages the author I would like to edit over a decade ago. Finally, after numerous enquiries, just gave up and edited wildly, figuring if they don’t care enough to ever respond to enquiries the best thing to do is give it my best shot. Then they respond. They are just there to police, never to assist.
As for the thread, it’s incredibly satisfying to delete a worthless article on some liberal airhead and watch a bunch of losers’ hard work go straight into the trash.
Are you an expert published in the field with multiple references published by other experts? Or are you just some buy who said, “Look what I can claim.”?
