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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

This article was deleted from Wikipedia in 2017. There is some deep irony in that fact considering that GiTS has numerous instances of memories being erased or modified.

Thankfully, the Wayback Machine preserved it.

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Archive.org modifies the memories it stores. But I don't find much irony in the article being deleted. It seems more appropriate as part of a larger article on Ghost in the Shell. It's an aspect of an imaginary world not something that stands alone in the context of general shared experience. An accurate understanding requires boiling all the oceans of Ghost in the Shell. As a standalone, it's more like an academic paper.

Incidentally, to the degree there's irony here, archive.org's modification of the content seems more relevant than it's deletion. Forgotten isn't wrong, it's just forgotten.

I find the fact that Wikipedia deletes content to be almost offensive, especially when there are so many 'stubs' and other one-paragraph articles all over the site. It's supposed to be a free encyclopedia that catalogs the world's information.

If there is a serious issue with an article, then fine, quarantine it or somehow set it aside. But to remove a well-written, well-cited and interesting article for dubious reasons really seems unnecessary. Maybe if they had incorporated it into the regular article on GiTS, it would make sense. But there is zero mention of the philosophical content:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell

Managing the scope of the project to keep it an encyclopedia is not a dubious reason.

A similar article might stand if it had good citations for literally every phrase, but this article doesn't have that, it looks like original work.

Perhaps, but if you go read the delete discussion and the admin slang used, it drips with preposterous disdain for everyone but themselves.

Mildly irritating

Perhaps it should be moved to wikibooks or have another project for opinion pieces.

Wikipedia has changed a lot. Even back in the mid-2000s, I remember trying to edit a page to deal with a "written like an advertisement" banner; did a lot of work .. and in a few months it was back to its crappy advert style. I've heard there is more editing control today to prevent things like that from happening, but it also is discouraging for anyone trying to edit a page.

There have been a lot of articles deleted over the years. There was a great porn purge where they removed a ton of porn stars and history of pornography unless topics were considered noteworthy. The linked article probably didn't have enough sources or too much original research.

Honestly, the first thing you should look at with any current or controversial article is the Talk Page .. and the history on the talk page. It's often way more useful and has current theories that may not have the best sources.

There is also Deletionpedia, but honestly archive.org is probably a better bet for deleted articles. Deletionpedia didn't really get started until a lot of stuff had been purged, and it still has a lot of gaps.

https://deletionpedia.org/en/Main_Page

Wikipedia had a 180 degree change in its stance on works of fiction in the last decade.

Character pages were deleted in bulk even when they were properly sourced, individual episodes pages were all merged together.

Administrators and moderators are pushing all this stuff to Wikia/Fandom, the sister project that is riddled with advertisement, user tracking and bad design.

https://ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Philosophy

Nice find!

I wonder if the people removing articles on fictional works are moving it to Wikia by themselves.

Interesting, I forgot that Wikia was founded by Jimbo (Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website) ). But I would no more call it a sister project of wikipedia. The official sister projects of Wikipedia are collected under the Wikimedia brand, see https://www.wikimedia.org/

I was shocked to learn that wikipedia deletes its history in some cases. I always told students to quote the history items when quoting wikipedia believing they are archived. It stresses the importance of the internet archive for any scientific work.

The unmodified versions of pages are still available, you just need to append "id_" to the date in the URL:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120224113551id_/https://en.wik...

How does it modify it? Are you talking about the timeline on top of the page?

I guess it might qualify as "original research". Still, very entertaining. Thank you.

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