4 ms·

reason for deletion?

mryan 14y ago
It says so right there on the page: > 19:09, 25 October 2012 TexasAndroid (talk | contribs) deleted page Tom Preston-Werner (A7: No explanation of the subject's significance (real person) (TW))
- setori88 14y ago
  i should be more clear - github has the potential to be a real threat to wikipedia in the long run. a group of hive minded individuals developing code together with powerful tools, tools more powerful than web text boxes. with a stretch of the imagination. github could start projects not only related to software projects but projects such as a repository for all human knowledge. is this a form of censorship or am i tilting at windmills?
  - teraflop 14y ago
    The article was not deleted because Wikipedians think GitHub isn't notable, much less that because they're somehow trying to suppress knowledge of it. They deleted it because (as far as I can tell) it contained no information about Tom Preston-Werner beyond the fact that he created GitHub and Gravatar, and that single fact is already mentioned on both companies' pages. I don't see any conspiracy here, especially given the existence of this: https://github.com/wikimedia https://github.com/wikimedia
    - setori88 14y ago
      fair enough, appreciate your input.
saurik 14y ago
It says right there: "A7: No explanation of the subject's significance (real person)". A7 = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CSD#A7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CSD#A7 I also do not have a Wikipedia article (despite a few peoples' random attempts to make one for me, and despite, to be entirely un-humble for a moment, having many more references about myself available online than mojombo) for what I will assume are similar reasons: if you are known in the greater world for only a single thing, even if you are known in smaller circles for a couple or a few things, Wikipedia prefers to have you merged into the article on that thing, rather than having a separate article for you.
- setori88 14y ago
  thank you i see now.
rsync 14y ago
The cult of "deletionism" insists that hard drive space is so precious at wikipedia it can't possibly be used for entries that Joe-Little-Kid-Wikipedia-Bigshot hasn't heard of. Always funny (and sad) when they get it this wrong. Jason Scott speaks of it better than anyone else: http://archive.org/details/20060408-jscott-wikipedia http://archive.org/details/20060408-jscott-wikipedia
- teraflop 14y ago
  I think that's misleading. The folks who go around deleting articles are not the ones who have to worry about things like server capacity. They do it because they think it keeps the standard of quality higher. The article's not in Google's cache anymore, but as far as I can tell from the snippet, it apparently consisted only of the sentence: "Tom Preston-Werner is the creator of Gravatar and co-founder/CEO of GitHub." That's more information than I knew from reading the headline of this post, but it's a far cry from an encyclopedia article. I don't see what's lost by deleting it until someone's willing to put in the effort to write something substantial.
  - tzs 14y ago
    > I don't see what's lost by deleting it until someone's willing to put in the effort to write something substantial He's mentioned as creator of Gravatar and co-creator of Github in their respective Wikipedia articles. When someone is mentioned as a prominent figure in connection with something that is Wikipedia-worthy, it is quite natural for someone reading that article to wonder "what else has this guy done?" and want to click his name to find out. Now people who ask that question have to resort to the search box. Deleting articles like this also, I suspect, reduces the chances that someone will put in the effort to make a more substantial article. Someone thinking of doing so will see that there once was an article and it was deleted, which will discourage them as they might worry that their work too will be deleted. Better, I think, to leave it there as a seed from which a more substantial article might grow.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      Wikipedia articles aren't intended to express a graph the way a "who's who" database does. Every article in the encyclopedia is expected to do a good job summarizing it subject and providing a guide to reputable sources on that subject. The problem with stub articles about people that serve only to map a person to every Wikipedia subject they've touched is WP:BLP. To sum that up: every article about a living person has to meet a higher standard of "not being wrong about that person", because when Wikipedia lists something wrong about (say) Tom Preston-Werner, it's plastering that wrongness at the top of every Google SERP, and this tends to piss people off. For obvious reasons, BLP articles are also a magnet for the most insidious kind of vandalism WP deals with: negative claims about real people that are difficult or impossible to refute "automatically", which is how virtually all vandalism on WP is handled. WP BLP articles thus incur a liability for the project. Often, that liability is more than offset by the value of the article itself. But here, it seems like much of the value of a T.P-W article is simply in making it slightly easier to search for T.P-W in WP. But WP already does a pretty good job of doing that. Marginal value, maximum liability.

mryan 14y ago

It says so right there on the page: > 19:09, 25 October 2012 TexasAndroid (talk | contribs) deleted page Tom Preston-Werner (A7: No explanation of the subject's significance (real person) (TW))

setori88 14y ago
i should be more clear - github has the potential to be a real threat to wikipedia in the long run. a group of hive minded individuals developing code together with powerful tools, tools more powerful than web text boxes. with a stretch of the imagination. github could start projects not only related to software projects but projects such as a repository for all human knowledge. is this a form of censorship or am i tilting at windmills?
- teraflop 14y ago
  The article was not deleted because Wikipedians think GitHub isn't notable, much less that because they're somehow trying to suppress knowledge of it. They deleted it because (as far as I can tell) it contained no information about Tom Preston-Werner beyond the fact that he created GitHub and Gravatar, and that single fact is already mentioned on both companies' pages. I don't see any conspiracy here, especially given the existence of this: https://github.com/wikimedia https://github.com/wikimedia
  - setori88 14y ago
    fair enough, appreciate your input.

saurik 14y ago

It says right there: "A7: No explanation of the subject's significance (real person)". A7 = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CSD#A7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CSD#A7 I also do not have a Wikipedia article (despite a few peoples' random attempts to make one for me, and despite, to be entirely un-humble for a moment, having many more references about myself available online than mojombo) for what I will assume are similar reasons: if you are known in the greater world for only a single thing, even if you are known in smaller circles for a couple or a few things, Wikipedia prefers to have you merged into the article on that thing, rather than having a separate article for you.

setori88 14y ago
thank you i see now.

rsync 14y ago

The cult of "deletionism" insists that hard drive space is so precious at wikipedia it can't possibly be used for entries that Joe-Little-Kid-Wikipedia-Bigshot hasn't heard of. Always funny (and sad) when they get it this wrong. Jason Scott speaks of it better than anyone else: http://archive.org/details/20060408-jscott-wikipedia http://archive.org/details/20060408-jscott-wikipedia

teraflop 14y ago
I think that's misleading. The folks who go around deleting articles are not the ones who have to worry about things like server capacity. They do it because they think it keeps the standard of quality higher. The article's not in Google's cache anymore, but as far as I can tell from the snippet, it apparently consisted only of the sentence: "Tom Preston-Werner is the creator of Gravatar and co-founder/CEO of GitHub." That's more information than I knew from reading the headline of this post, but it's a far cry from an encyclopedia article. I don't see what's lost by deleting it until someone's willing to put in the effort to write something substantial.
- tzs 14y ago
  > I don't see what's lost by deleting it until someone's willing to put in the effort to write something substantial He's mentioned as creator of Gravatar and co-creator of Github in their respective Wikipedia articles. When someone is mentioned as a prominent figure in connection with something that is Wikipedia-worthy, it is quite natural for someone reading that article to wonder "what else has this guy done?" and want to click his name to find out. Now people who ask that question have to resort to the search box. Deleting articles like this also, I suspect, reduces the chances that someone will put in the effort to make a more substantial article. Someone thinking of doing so will see that there once was an article and it was deleted, which will discourage them as they might worry that their work too will be deleted. Better, I think, to leave it there as a seed from which a more substantial article might grow.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Wikipedia articles aren't intended to express a graph the way a "who's who" database does. Every article in the encyclopedia is expected to do a good job summarizing it subject and providing a guide to reputable sources on that subject. The problem with stub articles about people that serve only to map a person to every Wikipedia subject they've touched is WP:BLP. To sum that up: every article about a living person has to meet a higher standard of "not being wrong about that person", because when Wikipedia lists something wrong about (say) Tom Preston-Werner, it's plastering that wrongness at the top of every Google SERP, and this tends to piss people off. For obvious reasons, BLP articles are also a magnet for the most insidious kind of vandalism WP deals with: negative claims about real people that are difficult or impossible to refute "automatically", which is how virtually all vandalism on WP is handled. WP BLP articles thus incur a liability for the project. Often, that liability is more than offset by the value of the article itself. But here, it seems like much of the value of a T.P-W article is simply in making it slightly easier to search for T.P-W in WP. But WP already does a pretty good job of doing that. Marginal value, maximum liability.