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A comment on A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign. Parent comment

Re:A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign by tptacek on Saturday May 19, 2018 @04:38PM (#17109618)
"Shameful" is a good word for it. Stuff like this is a major reason --- maybe the major reason --- behind most of the limitations of the Wikipedia platform. It is, for instance, the primary cause of "deletionism": marginal articles are difficult to police, and so the project has to establish a notability cut-off so it can constrain the problem at least to articles where there are sources to tie claims to.

I'm not saying you should feel bad about yourself, but it's good if people can recognize what WP is up against.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign by yarrel on Saturday May 19, 2018 @06:06PM (#17109977)
You are confusing edits with articles.

Deletionists tend to confuse their personal ignorance (often of a website called "Google" [yes I know how notability works, no that's not an argument against not bothering to even trivially check whether an article can be improved rather than deleted]) with a mandate to sabotage Wikipedia.

People who remove cruft from articles, rather than speedy deleting articles that aren't about Pokemon, are not deletionists and should not be invoked as human shields for deletionists.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign by tptacek on Saturday May 19, 2018 @06:40PM (#17110117)
No, you've misunderstood my argument. The problem is that it's difficult for editors to remove "cruft" on articles about marginal topics, because there are so few (usually: zero) reliable sources to draw from. You can't start from a premise that "cruft" can be removed without removing classes of articles; that begs the question that deletionists answer.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign by xelxebar on Monday May 21, 2018 @02:28AM (#17116543)
> No, you've misunderstood my argument. I'm jumping in the middle here, but mind if I make a meta-comment?

Phrases like "you've misunderstood my words" can sound quite confrontational and, in my experience, tend to provoke defensive responses rather than Cooperative Idea Sharing TM.

I find ideas flow more freely and coopertively by taking the miscommunication blame on myself, "Oh, I must have been unclear. We're on the same page about X, but what I was really trying to say is..."

Anyway, that's just my feel on the meta-interaction above. Carry on.

[ Parent | on HN ]