> Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason self-published media—whether books, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, blogs, personal pages on social networking sites, Internet forum postings, or tweets—are largely not acceptable. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources#Self...
This makes it really hard to defend open source software against WP:N allegations, since most of your coverage is from these kinds of sources...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olusegun_Obasanjo
[2] http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/03/13/WikipediaWhosYo...
Especially since there are still so many holes in the encyclopedia. For instance, parallel giant slalom is a snowboarding event in the Olympics. Yet it doesn't have a page on Wikipedia, just a one line mention on a general snowboarding page: "an event that involves head-to-head racing". I would not be surprised if someone had created a page at some point but it was deleted for not being notable or sourced or some other junk.
I was involved with Wikipedia very heavily for it's first three years (not been involved for the last 5 years), and there have been periods when it went through more liberal stages of allowing a broader range of content. The policies they have now aren't something that've just been made up. They're policies that have evolved over a decade of seeing what works and what doesn't.
Non-notable articles often end up abandoned and vandalized for long period. Sure the precise criteria for notability and verifiability might be debatable, but there's absolutely no question that those criteria help make Wikipedia a reliable source of data.
Think about the reason you want something in Wikipedia (rather than just say on a Google Sites page or Mahalo, etc). You want it on Wikipedia precisely because of the reputation it has, and that reputation is in a large part down to the criteria of notability and verifiability.
Yes, but can't we use some other criteria for this than the utterly absurd ones being deployed to destroy all of the articles on open source software? I used to use the Wikipedia to orient myself in that domain, but now it really is practically useless due to the latest round of deletion madness, which is based on the "If it's not mentioned in the New York Times, it doesn't exist" criterion. (For example, I was looking into wikis recently, and found that if I went back 6 months, the articles were much better...) It seems plain that different criteria need to be developed for different domains.
Either the destruction of the `dwm` article follows from the principles being deployed or it doesn't; and either it is worth an article (which it would be simply insane to deny) or it isn't. You don't take a stand on which combination of views you hold, and what the solution is, but only affirm the abstract principle that 'there are limits'.
I think there are problems - from what I've seen, people outside of an area can be too quick to judge notability. But I find the attitude that nothing should be deleted naive.
The WP article does still lie in userspace waiting to be resurrected, but it's a complete waste of time to try and get it back into mainspace: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MichaelQSchmidt/sandbox_Th...
There are other options out there. Citizendium? If the article about dwm is deleted, re-write it at Citizendium. Why not?
Wikipedia is so 2001-2009. Its time is over, I think.
If you think all articles including the absurd example given above should be included, notability isn't the only thing brought into question. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Wikipedia_is_not
Ultimately, the content is yours to fork if you'd like. As mentioned elsewhere in these discussions, it's really the community that's the main workhorse, something which can't be forked (split perhaps, but not forked).