... Protected Fravia: Repeatedly recreated ...
(wasn't me, by the way - I've only done occasional anonymous minor fixes and original source contribs)
P.S. I also looked for a place to protest the deletion, but couldn't find anything suitable.
P.P.S. Please do not upvote this and my grandparent comment. Thanks.
Have you ever read a WP RfA? From the way you wrote this comment, I'm guessing you haven't. Wikipedia adminship is cliquish and obnoxious, but the process is relatively rigorous; WP users read through entire multi-year edit histories, dredging up "controversies" for public debate. If there's a cabal, it's an organic one.
Moreover, admins don't singlehandledly delete and protect pages. This page was "protected" because normal WP users effectively deleted it (replacing it with a redirect). There was a discussion about whether to do that, in which anyone with an interest in the article could have participated. There was a procedural shortcut here (since the page was redirected instead of deleted), but there was a procedure, and it was an open and transparent one.
At any step along the way from creation to protection, decisions could have been appealed to yet another open, transparent forum, where Fravia's proponents could have debated ad nauseum why WP needed an article about him. They have plenty of opportunities to present evidence for his notability and inclusion.
Pages get "protected" when people ignore those opportunities and procedures, and undo the work that the WP "fulltimers" do to maintain the encyclopedia.
Your comment is a caricature of what actually happens on WP. It also ignores the reality of a massive living document, exposed to the public at large in the top of most Google results and routinely highlighted in the mainstream media. If preventing an article from showcasing Fravia was a mistake, 1000 other cases this week of people attempting to SEO their products or write pages about their girlfriends weren't.
In this case, I think someone well-meaning tried to enforce the 'notoriety' policy. Now, it's a matter of judgement if a reverse engineer known to hundreds or thousands deserves a place along Donald Duck.
Personally, I don't see much harm in giving a Wikipedia page to anyone who ever lived.
They have arguments for that, and they are sensible arguments.
For instance, if you provide articles for everyone who ever lived, someone needs to police those articles. If you don't police the articles, you end up with tens of thousands of pages making specious claims about people, some of which may be damaging to the subject of the article, others of which may be damaging to the fields those people represent, all under the aegis of one of the most important sites on the Internet.
Also, WP is by design not a primary source. Original research isn't allowed on WP. It's not WP's job to validate and referee research, to provide political analysis, or to promote people and companies. But the overwhelming majority of the content you'd get in articles about non-notable people would be inherently original research.
By restricting the WP to summaries of independent reliable sourcing on notable people, the problem of maintaining an entire encyclopedia as a volunteer effort is at least tractable. I think veteran Wikipedians could probably win the argument that eliminating those standards altogether could make maintaining WP intractable.
Also, remember that the article we're discussing here really sucked. Fravia might be important, but whoever wrote that article did him a disservice if he was.
I feel the same way.
Thank Reddit for this one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Matt_Crypto#Fravia
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8hxhx/goodbye_f...
Where am I wrong? If I'm not, why should you be taken seriously about this subject?
but i have to admit, you've done a really good job of curbing your own inflammatory language. i find your comments much easier to read as a result. if only we could all be so flexible in the face of unexpected challenges.
Replying to your post as I have done has been a waste of time, I know exactly what I experienced there (I was SHOCKED when it happened) and discussing it here in great detail (as in, go to the admin's discussion page, and look for the exchange we had then, to copy and paste here) is absolutely meaningless, a waste of time, Wikipedia as it exists now is a complete waste of time, it's a complete failure, and it constitutes negative value, as I outlined in a previous post about this. I could give a hoot whether you take me seriously on this subject, it means nothing to me, I was replying to pg's comment.
Edit: since when do YOU decide what is becoming or unbecoming here?
I also apologize for dragging in this topic. Mind if I take it out now and hang it to dry ?
If I become too emotional about this point with Wikipedia, it is because the geek/nerd/techie/propellerhead/[INSERT TERM FOR US] in me is just OUTRAGED at what I witnessed firsthand at wikipedia.
Note to self: avoid wikipedia related discussions, and try to stick to Slashdot from now on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...
AfDs can be contested by doing a deletion review. In this case, based in the comments in the AfD I assume there wouldn't be an objection to writing a new sourced article. It was probably protected because the same content was being readded, not because the article itself should not be recreated.
Note that the outcome of the AfD was not followed; the content does not seem to have been merged into the original article. Creating a paragraph in the article on reverse engineering on the guy seemed to be the original intent.