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Friday, January 12th, 2007 09:08 am
"The Suburban Jungle" got deleted on Wikipedia.

Right now, I am of two feelings about Wikipedia. On the one hand, it's pretty useful for a quick reference – if I'm reading my webcomics and run into a reference to Dennis Miller, thirty seconds and I know what I need to – but at least in the past year or two, it has developed a dismaying trend towards deletion.

I'm talking to [livejournal.com profile] nanakikun about this, and he's pointed out a huge problem: the process is biased towards deletion. All articles are guilty non-notable until proven notable. To delete an article requires nothing but, "I don't see proof that this article is important" – a fellow could delete five thousand files a day, and some people do – while to relist takes, at the minimum, half an hour to track down sources per article.

I don't know why things are this way. As [livejournal.com profile] nanakikun has pointed out, you can't change anything without knowing what is going on. But something is massively broken.

The deletion review is here, by the way.
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Sunday, January 14th, 2007 05:13 am (UTC)
When it first started, Wikipedia was fascinating. But these days it's good only for when you want to go get some rough idea of how something works or who someone was. Almost every article I do look at has a "this is up for debate" disclaimer. It should be hard to delete something in the encyclopedia -- especially a theoretically infinitely-sized encyclopedia -- unless it's illegal or wrong. Wikipedia's fundamentally flawed as long as its design allows for easy deletion. I'm with you on it.