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