The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola":<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2011_September_23" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...</a><p>Deletions include:<p>* The "vice editor in chief" of a Japanese anime magazine<p>* A list of episodes for a TV show that never aired<p>* Articles about a no-name iPhone game, and also a no-name video editing tool, presumably both written by the authors of the programs<p>* A promo for a not-yet-released book<p>* An article about "Rickstar", a musical artist who had apparently self-released one song<p>* A strategy guide for The Sims 3<p>* A bio of a junior league hockey player (albeit one with an awesome name)<p>* An article about a youth football team<p>... and it just keeps going on like that.<p>This particular article was motivated by the deletion of "Jessie_Stricchiola". Let's look at her AfD:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jessie_Stricchiola" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...</a><p>Where we learn:<p>* This is an article about an SEO consultant.<p>* It contained a promotional link to the SEO consultant's book.<p>* That SEO consultant had been quoted in a number of stories, but never written <i>about</i> in any of those stories; the only reliable information to be gleaned from any source about her was "once gave a quote about click fraud to a trade press journalist" (or in one case a reporter at WaPo).<p>It took <i>two weeks</i> for Wikipedia to determine that this article should be deleted. During that entire time, her article stood with a very prominent notice saying it was going to be deleted, with a prominent link allowing people to argue in favor of keeping or, better yet, locate a real reliable source backing up any claim to her notability. Two weeks. Read the AfD. Read DGG's exegesis of the sources cited in this article --- the guy found out <i>how many libraries carried her book</i>.<p>Now, think about this: Jessie's article wasn't a marquee deletion event. Nobody gave a shit. It was just one of many pages up for AfD that week, alongside the founder of a political party nobody has ever heard of and 3 members of non-professional football clubs. <i>In every one of those retarded articles</i>, someone had to marshall real arguments, chase down real sources, and in many cases defend those arguments against both bona fide Wikipedia contributors and also sockpuppets of the subjects of the article. <i>Every time</i>.<p>Anyone who can snark that Wikipedia is a knee-jerk or arbitrary culture is betraying a deep ignorance of how the most successful Internet reference project in the history of the Internet actually works.<p>Something I don't get about people on HN and their attitude towards Wikipedia. None of you, not a one, expects Linus Torvalds to accept arbitrary contributions to the Linux kernel simply because that code could be disabled by default and wasn't going to bother anyone (unlike a bogus Wikipedia article, which taints the encyclopedia and also Google search results). People with experimental or long-shot Linux contributions (at least, people besides ESR) tend to set up Github pages instead of writing long-winded rants about the "deletionism" rampant in the world's most successful open source project. But Wikipedia kills an article about an SEO consultant, and you're up in arms.<p><i>Mostly, this comment I'm writing is just bitching</i>. So, to repay you the kindness of reading my own windbag rant, I offer you this gift: THE VERY FEW SIMPLE RULES OF THUMB YOU WILL EVER NEED TO AVOID FRUSTRATION OVER THE "Deletionism" OF WIKIPEDIA:<p><i>RULE NUMBER ONE: DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT YOURSELF, YOUR COMPANY, PROGRAMS THAT YOU WROTE, OR YOUR UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL.</i><p><i>RULE NUMBER TWO: IF YOU HAVE TO ASK, DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR FRIENDS' COMPANIES, PROGRAMS THAT YOUR FRIENDS WROTE, OR YOUR FRIENDS UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL.</i><p>They should just put those two rules on the edit box on the site, I agree; would make everyone's life easier.