Wikipedia deletes entry on PBWiki, the biggest hosted competitor with 550,000 wikis

Misleading title. "Wikipedia" didn't do anything; an Articles-for-Deletion (AfD) vote did. In the vote, which has a full change history, nobody spoke up for PeanutButter Wiki, nor were any of the sources mentioned in the comments here present in the original article. This was a totally normal, in-process deletion.

Should the closing admin have glanced at Google News? Probably. Note that one of the AfD votes here makes indirect references to external sources, implying that they only peripherally cover PBWiki as "just another wiki farm". Maybe that's fair, maybe not, but you can see why in a "debate" with no dissenters, this just got closed quickly.

The fix for this is trivial. Take the original content of the PBWiki Wikipedia article --- it's still around --- and paste it back into the article. Add the external sources to the end (don't even worry about style, someone else will fix it). Done. An article with genuine sourcing in Newsweek, Forbes, and the New York Times isn't going to be deleted.

God I'm such a dork for knowing this stuff.

Wikispaces (a PBWiki competitor) had our Wikipedia entry deleted in August 2006. At the time we were non-notable and had a medium- to low-quality entry written by others. During our deletion process, we argued that it was perfectly reasonable that Wikipedia delete our article, but it seemed quite unreasonable to single us out of a dozen other non-notable wiki farms (not to mention hundreds of other non-notable websites) that were not being considered for deletion. The response from the AfD commentors was in essence, "fine, go ahead and propose deletion for the wiki farms you think don't belong". We of course had no interest in doing that.

I was upset for some time that our article was deleted, but I'm not anymore. Wikipedia's standards don't work for small companies. In August 2006 when our article was deleted, we had less than 100,000 users and 50,000 wikis. Today we have 1.4M users, 595,000 wikis, and a healthy and growing business. A Wikipedia entry might be nice to have, but it doesn't have anything to do with how we serve our customers and build our business.

Maybe it just wasn't notable? I've never even heard of PBWiki.

It's odd that Wikipedians would delete the article, instead of just changing it to say, "PBWiki: a collaborative website for sandwich lovers."

That headline is a bit sensationalist. PBWiki isn't really a competitor to Wikipedia. Or Wikia, even.

Last known position:

23:37, September 15, 2008 Punkmorten (Talk | contribs) deleted "PBWiki" ‎ (R1: Redirect to a deleted, nonexistent, or invalid target)

I can't find the original PBWiki page but it's more likely that it wasn't up to snuff instead of a blatant conflict of interest delete.