Removed? (Wikipedia deletionism)

[Aaron Smith]

Vladimir Panteleev Wrote:

> On Tue, 15 Feb 2011 03:00:59 +0200, Aaron Smith <mail at pathway.org> wrote:
> 
> > Thank god we have TDPL, otherwise the D page would quickly lose this  
> > battle. D is much much more notable than Nemerle, Alice ML, Pure,  
> > Nosica, Kiev, Einstein, Alma-0, Joy, Zonnon, Y, Cat, Fancy, Ambi,  
> > Ptolemy, Mythryl, COMIT, Ioke, EASY, Aikido, A+, Adenine, Afnix,  
> > Bsisith, ChinesePython, AngelScript, Algae, Agena, Taxi, Inger, Iota,  
> > Jot, Agora, Falcon, Averest, Lava, Factor, Glagol. These all have been  
> > deleted by the same editor.
> 
> Not necessarily defending his actions, but speaking personally not one of  
> these languages rings a bell to me, while I've heard of D in contexts  
> otherwise unrelated to D several times.

I'm just saying you should have some sort of a track record of writing quality articles /and/ possibly real world competence before getting the permission to remove content, especially if you're hunting down over 35 articles on short notice.

The Wikipedia policy guidelines are more or less out of place. If they care about not wasting server space, they should avoid these votings and arguments as much as possible. In general article removals should be harder to perform, e.g. requiring a 3/4 or 5/6 or 9/10 consencus.

The meatpuppetry argument is especially awkward. Assume someone has personal issues with D and decides to nominate the 'D programming language' article for deletion (AfD). Next, some D user periodically updating the D article notices this, starts a new (emotionally colored) thread in reddit and posts the link to the article to the newsgroup. This is something that badly pisses off the Wikipedia deletionists and soon everyone defending the article become meatpuppets in their eyes. If you call people with offensive names, you lose your vote and might get a permaban. foreach(name in reddit.thread || d.newsgroup) might also get a permaban if the deletionists are in a bad mood. It takes a huge amount of effort to actually keep the articles. It would be much easier to just leave them there and let the maintainers fix the issues.

Back to the topic..  at least Alice ML was used for teaching functional programming in some universities. There are also boatloads of papers about it, web sites, active users, and maybe even some dedicated books. This was all dismissed in the deletionist process.