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I completely agree! I updated something on my father's wikipedia page (he founded a city and was a mayor), and even though the article was 5 years old, the chan

I completely agree! I updated something on my father's wikipedia page (he founded a city and was a mayor), and even though the article was 5 years old, the change brought the article under review and it was cited for deletion due to notability! I countered everyone of their arguments with sourced articles directly that met the guidelines for notability and they just deleted the messages from their talk pages. They eventually stopped responding and left the article for deletion. Luckily a compassionate editor came along (who happened to be female) and completely defended it and me. edit: I just searched for the page and it is deleted! I am going to get to the bottom of this, this is ridiculous, who do these people think they are? edit 2: When the editor apologized to me, she told me to notify her if the page was ever deleted "If the article gets deleted, please let me know. -- Uzma Gamal". I've sent her a message and will update...This is crazy!

crististm 14y ago
For reasons like these, whenever I see "please give me money" Wikipedia commercials, I just say yea....Nope!!
- matznerd 14y ago
  It's pretty ridiculous that people will go this far out of their way to delete an article that is obviously not spam or anything like that. Seriously, I got pretty emotional having to defend my father's notability to a stranger on the internet who is on a power-trip. At least the woman standing up for me (and my Dad) proves there are at least some good people on there...
  - ktizo 14y ago
    They've gone and deleted the page on Atomic Dielectric Resonance Scanning as well, seemingly on the basis that the page was made by the son of the guy who invented the technology.
  - ShardPhoenix 14y ago
    The fact that you are so emotionally invested in the subject is a good reason why you shouldn't be the one writing or creating the article in the first place.
    - mjn 14y ago
      It also tends to lead to distorted understandings of the problems in these kinds of discussions, imo. There are a lot of things that can be improved on Wikipedia, but they are not most clearly seen if your only interaction with Wikipedia is writing articles where you have a strong conflict of interest. You get a better idea of what's good and bad if you put in a good-faith effort to contribute to articles that don't relate to your own business/self/family/books first, and see how that goes. It's not even strictly prohibited to work on articles where you have a conflict of interest, but it's not a good place to start. I find that many people who dismiss Wikipedia entirely didn't ever make that good-faith effort to understand and contribute. I chatted at a conference with a professor who had very strong opinions on Wikipedia and appeared to be positioning himself as very knowledgeable about it... based on his one and only effort to edit it, creating an article about himself.
      - DanBC 14y ago
        > I find that many people who dismiss Wikipedia entirely didn't ever make that good-faith effort to understand and contribute. I find many people people who dismiss wikipedia entirely did make that good faith effort to understand and contribute. They gave up after - writing articles (with sources) about early 20th C Olympic athletes which were bulk deleted as not notable - making small changes to articles to fix spelling, grammar, or style. Each change required extensive reading of the MoS to get right. Almost every change was reverted within minutes to the previous version by someone using twinkle, or some auto revert tool, or someone with an image of a police-officer style "vandal patrol". (Some of the fixes were clearly fixes from something incorrect to correct. A few of them were matters of style, bringing things into compliance with the MoS, or making something consistent with the rest of the page.) Worse than having the changes reverted was to sometimes have a warning templated to their talk page. - the hatred for people who edit without making accounts. - a bizarre process of user name review after the username was deemed "confusing". (Note the software has hard coded limits on what can become a username; further there are a bunch of filters to prevent certain words being used). The username was not similar to any wikipedian username, nor to any function or process of wikipedia, nor to any kid of role account (real or otherwise.) What could the name be confused with? This, coupled with hatred for IP editing, lead to death. So, now, we both have our anecdotes about people who've had poor experiences with wikipedia. Yours is interesting. Creating an article about yourself is clearly a bad idea. But how did his experience end up with him hating wikipedia, and not being pleased that wikipedia has strong process in place to prevent odd biases? Why is it acceptable to chase off expert users just because they've made a mistake? Why do you assume he made no good faith effort to contribute, and not that he made a mistake, and tried to contribute, and got chased off by over vigorous editors.
- kylebrown 14y ago
  That is a very good reason not to donate. I wonder if there is an organized campaign to fix the overzealous deletion problem (by changing the "notability" policy), to boycott as long as it remains and pledge to donate if it is changed to a more objective policy.
- VMG 14y ago
  Well, if Wikipedia didn't have any money at all, there would be no articles whatsoever. Wouldn't that be worse?

crististm 14y ago

For reasons like these, whenever I see "please give me money" Wikipedia commercials, I just say yea....Nope!!

matznerd 14y ago
It's pretty ridiculous that people will go this far out of their way to delete an article that is obviously not spam or anything like that. Seriously, I got pretty emotional having to defend my father's notability to a stranger on the internet who is on a power-trip. At least the woman standing up for me (and my Dad) proves there are at least some good people on there...
- ktizo 14y ago
  They've gone and deleted the page on Atomic Dielectric Resonance Scanning as well, seemingly on the basis that the page was made by the son of the guy who invented the technology.
- ShardPhoenix 14y ago
  The fact that you are so emotionally invested in the subject is a good reason why you shouldn't be the one writing or creating the article in the first place.
  - mjn 14y ago
    It also tends to lead to distorted understandings of the problems in these kinds of discussions, imo. There are a lot of things that can be improved on Wikipedia, but they are not most clearly seen if your only interaction with Wikipedia is writing articles where you have a strong conflict of interest. You get a better idea of what's good and bad if you put in a good-faith effort to contribute to articles that don't relate to your own business/self/family/books first, and see how that goes. It's not even strictly prohibited to work on articles where you have a conflict of interest, but it's not a good place to start. I find that many people who dismiss Wikipedia entirely didn't ever make that good-faith effort to understand and contribute. I chatted at a conference with a professor who had very strong opinions on Wikipedia and appeared to be positioning himself as very knowledgeable about it... based on his one and only effort to edit it, creating an article about himself.
    - DanBC 14y ago
      > I find that many people who dismiss Wikipedia entirely didn't ever make that good-faith effort to understand and contribute. I find many people people who dismiss wikipedia entirely did make that good faith effort to understand and contribute. They gave up after - writing articles (with sources) about early 20th C Olympic athletes which were bulk deleted as not notable - making small changes to articles to fix spelling, grammar, or style. Each change required extensive reading of the MoS to get right. Almost every change was reverted within minutes to the previous version by someone using twinkle, or some auto revert tool, or someone with an image of a police-officer style "vandal patrol". (Some of the fixes were clearly fixes from something incorrect to correct. A few of them were matters of style, bringing things into compliance with the MoS, or making something consistent with the rest of the page.) Worse than having the changes reverted was to sometimes have a warning templated to their talk page. - the hatred for people who edit without making accounts. - a bizarre process of user name review after the username was deemed "confusing". (Note the software has hard coded limits on what can become a username; further there are a bunch of filters to prevent certain words being used). The username was not similar to any wikipedian username, nor to any function or process of wikipedia, nor to any kid of role account (real or otherwise.) What could the name be confused with? This, coupled with hatred for IP editing, lead to death. So, now, we both have our anecdotes about people who've had poor experiences with wikipedia. Yours is interesting. Creating an article about yourself is clearly a bad idea. But how did his experience end up with him hating wikipedia, and not being pleased that wikipedia has strong process in place to prevent odd biases? Why is it acceptable to chase off expert users just because they've made a mistake? Why do you assume he made no good faith effort to contribute, and not that he made a mistake, and tried to contribute, and got chased off by over vigorous editors.
kylebrown 14y ago
That is a very good reason not to donate. I wonder if there is an organized campaign to fix the overzealous deletion problem (by changing the "notability" policy), to boycott as long as it remains and pledge to donate if it is changed to a more objective policy.
VMG 14y ago
Well, if Wikipedia didn't have any money at all, there would be no articles whatsoever. Wouldn't that be worse?