Well, it appears that downvote abuse seems to have somewhat abated after a rash of downvote hordes around the new years (goodness that was annoying)....now they just flag and delete everything in sight when it doesn't fall into their personal concept of "interesting".

I might be mistaken but I think davidw was referring to earlier attempts to delete the article on Wikipedia, not Hacker News.

See, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

From the deletion discussion: "Previous AfD was a trainwreck due to offsite activism."

Translation: People from the "rest of the internet" stepped in to clarify how important they thought the article was, so they decided to declare the discussion invalid.