5 ms·
I'm not sure how much of the article you read. You have a long angry rant (that makes good points) about people that get upset because a Wikipedia page they car
by omaranto 15y ago
I'm not sure how much of the article you read. You have a long angry rant (that makes good points) about people that get upset because a Wikipedia page they care about is deleted. The article is not about that, it is about how hard it is to figure out how to navigate the Wikipedia waters to give support to an article that has been deleted or is up for deletion, etc. It is about Wikipedia's usability in cases like this. (If you did read the article and knew this, but still felt like ranting on a tangential note, I apologize.)
- tptacek 15y agoI don't blame you for not carefully reading my rant, but I addressed your point somewhere in the middle of it: when the article went up for deletion, there was a big link on the article itself saying how to vote on the deletion. The thing that this guy writing this post didn't do that any reasonable person could have been expected to do: click the name of the admin who deleted the article and ask him on his talk page what to do about the deletion. The admin would have answered, because if he hadn't, one of several rival admin factions would note his failure to follow process and bankrolled it as ammunition in some upcoming admin war.
- sethg 15y agoThe OP was not familiar with the Wikipedia convention that editors talk to one another by editing one another’s talk pages. Instead, he followed the instructions on the automated email that Wikipedia sent him, which said “To contact the editor, visit [the editor’s page]”. His reward for following those instructions was a box telling him that actually, that page isn’t the venue for sending a message. The box told him to “use” the talk page instead. You and I know that user talk pages are “used” by just editing them, but he didn’t, and nothing above the fold on that page told him what he should have been doing.
- tptacek 15y agoI just don't buy it. There are some dumb, dumb, dumb people thoroughly ensconced in Wikipedia and its processes; clearly it's not that hard to figure out that to talk to an admin, you can just edit their page. I think Danny Sullivan is being disingenuous. Mediawiki is an obtuse piece of software; he knows that, and we know that, and he's using it as a fig leaf to conceal the fact that he wasn't able to push his friend's article onto the encyclopedia. I'm only able to say that because I don't know anything about Sullivan; he's just an abstraction to me. I certainly don't mean for him to take this personally. But I do not believe him.
- philwelch 15y agoIt's not especially edifying to discuss your perceptions of Danny's hidden motives, when the intended topic of discussion is what Danny actually wrote.
- tptacek 15y agoWhat Danny Sullivan did write appears to be disingenuous: he didn't want to read a noisy web page in order to override a community vote on Wikipedia, scribbled on a page he wasn't supposed to edit, had his scribbling carefully preserved by another Wikipedian, and then started yelling.
- maxerickson 15y agoWikipedia presents itself as a pain in the ass. It takes very little energy to convince someone to walk away.
- sethg 15y agoDumb, dumb, dumb people can learn to follow all sorts of rituals, if they’re sufficiently motivated. That fact does not, in and of itself, justify the rituals.
- TeMPOraL 15y agoIf you mean those rituals to filter out the unmotivated, then, in fact, it does.