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Comment by macintux

4 years ago

> It's such a tragedy for hard work and human knowledge to disappear into the void just because radical deletionists managed to take over Wikipedia.

After browsing the site and seeing mostly crap, I'm genuinely curious: do you have examples of content erroneously evicted by radical deletionists?

14 comments

macintux

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mindcrime  4 years ago

There's been quite a lot of techie related content - pages for programming languages, OSS projects, etc. that were deleted as a result of the overly aggressive deletion policies, IMO. No, I'm not going to give you a list though, because I'm not interested in spending my time here arguing over the minutia of whether or not a given page is "really notable". Not wanting to waste my time on that crap is one reason I rarely edit WP anymore, and I'm not going to re-engage in that here. You can find your own examples, or simply disregard my blathering, it's all the same to me either way.

  • carapace  4 years ago

    Here's an example: https://deletionpedia.org/en/VList

    Ten years ago pjscott mentioned "Phil Bagwell's VList" here: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/VList

    • sparkie  4 years ago

      I've wondered why the VList does not have its own article, nor does RAOTS (cited by Bagwell in his VList paper), which is definitely noteworthy. Instead both are limited to one-sentence descriptions in the Dynamic Arrays page. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_array#Variants]. That more programmer don't know about these two structures is almost criminal, and we're generally stuck with linear complexity linked-lists in almost every language because of it. If these were included in the comparison table on the same page, they would make the ones which are included look bad.

      The article on the Kernel Programming Language [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(programming_language)] was deleted some years back, yet is still referenced on the page for fexprs [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fexpr]. Deletion log here:[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&logid...].

      > "Minor, academic programming language. Only affiliated references, viz. a tech report by the inventor and his webpage. Some surfing brought up multiple implementations, but no use, no widely-cited papers, no in-dep.."

      Kernel is a very innovative language which addressed some time-old complaints about fexprs, and gives a completely new perspective and ways to think about programming, along with a formal calculus to reason about it. [http://web.cs.wpi.edu/%7Ejshutt/kernel.html] I actually discovered Kernel via wikipedia when researching fexprs, and it later became a major focus of my research.

      Kernel has been discussed many times on here and elsewhere. It has dozens of implementations. Unfortunately, John Shutt passed away last year, so it is unlikely we will see further developments to Kernel itself.

      My best guess is that the deletionist simply didn't understand the topic they were deleting.

carapace  4 years ago

There's a group that calls themselves "Guerrilla Skeptics" that worked hard over several years to delete the article about David R. Hawkins (and here's where I would normally link to his Wikipedia article...)

The page itself was deleted, but there's a "Deletion log" about the page where you can see it get restored and deleted back and forth, and read the discussions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delet...

Meanwhile, in Germany: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_R._Hawkins

yasp  4 years ago

https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/political-deletionism-at-w...

  • daedalus_f  4 years ago

    The author of this article wants me to believe wikipedia has been taken over by the "super woke" but frankly they just come across as having an unhealthy obsession with IQ as a heritable trait and desperately want to use this to tie race to IQ.

    They describe themselves as a "contrarian scientist". At the end the author complains that their wikipedia page has been deleted twice, my heart bleeds.

  • striking  4 years ago

    I've read through the section of this article which discusses the "Jewish Intelligence" page, and find the reasoning behind why we should be mad about the deletion to be extraordinarily weak compared to the explanation given by the editor (the editor that is then ad hominem attacked by the author of the article).

    Do you really expect anyone to believe this?

  • macintux  4 years ago

    Every topic referenced there is related to racial superiority, at least from a quick skim. I can see why Wikipedia might be gunshy on that front.

    • ptsneves  4 years ago

      Also felt that everything in the article is racially connected. If there was a fundamentally wrong thing with Wikipedia i would expect more topics to be touched.

      Furthermore some of the justifications seemed fine, with the only thing I could get behind being that except for unlawful content the history of edits should never be removed. That would be the proverbial rewriting of history, which I find wrong. A pity the author got too caught up calling woke and revealing personal details of supposed conflicts of interest.

      Finally calling woke is as much a cannary denominator for ideological activism as reactionary or capitalist. It reeks miles away. If you are anti censorship focus on that.

  • car_analogy  4 years ago

    Wow, in one of the cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Article...), they actually deleted the page entirely, then re-created it, so that any prior edit history was lost. Talk about deceptive.

    Good thing no-one printed the page out, or we might have to hear one of those "Where they have burned books, they will end up burning people" lectures. But this is "on a computer", so entirely different.

  • fshbbdssbbgdd  4 years ago

    In general, it’s a bad idea to bring up an unrelated controversy as an example when you’re trying to argue for anything, because you’re going to lose a good chunk of your audience who might otherwise be open to your point of view.