Christopher Monsanto gives up trying to delete PL articles

Let's consider the logic of that statement by taking a different example. A young child is in a shop and is told by its parent it cannot have some candy. Young child "I want candy! I want candy!". The child becomes enraged, more and more enraged, by the behavior of the parent. Should the child now teach the parent a harsh lesson? Since the parent's behavior has induced a great deal of rage a very harsh lesson seems entirely appropriate.

Regardless, I misunderstood Wikipedia policy and I apologize to those I have offended. I honestly didn't think a couple of deletion discussions was so grave, and I ask that those who abhor me so try to imagine what it's like to make a mistake and have it go viral.

I disagree, that sort of behavior is absolutely par-for-the-course in almost every dealing I've seen with WP's self-selected editor class.

Chris seems to be really decent. even if he had a lapse in judgement, he embraces pleasant discussion. i'm embarrassed by the juvenille response: the meanness most of all, but also the unwillingness to see someone else's perspective or view efforts as a collaboration rather than a fight.

if a teammate messes up, you help them, you don't shoot them down.

I think such people are indeed very necessary for the world to function (or we'd only have corruption and worse) and there's no reason to be annoyed about them.

Or to put it another way: Don't hate the player. Hate the game.

(But: Exceptions do apply.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules

When he said "fixing" I don't get the feeling _he_ thinks it's broken but rather is acknowledging other people's take (as evidence) and lead him to believe that there could be room for improvement.

To me this shows that he believes things are ok, but he would agree to any changes if the community thought changes were necessary. That's quite reasonable to me.

That's quite different from the allegation. (That he thought they were wrong but just followed the guidelines anyway. Or have I missed another quote where the allegation is true?

At least you're getting voted up, which should help. It's an anti-spam measure... also, try clicking on the 'link' of something you want to reply to. If there's too much back and forth in a thread, it'll hide the 'reply' button in an attempt to slow down conversation, but obviously this is a bit of a special case.

You are clearly disingenuous. You complained about: if only people had told you that you were doing wrong. People did, and you came up with snarks and smileys and gratuitously appointed yourself the position of a judge that decides which citations had impact and which did not. And when it went out of hand, you played the victim and you changed your excuse to 'if only _more_ people did, more reasonably etc. etc'.

``I only recommended a deletion, did not delete it myself``, is another exhibition of dis ingenuousness and irresponsibility. Same for the shuttling between, "I am sorry" and, ``I was right in every case``. (Things between `` `` aren't actual quotes)

I believe you are an adult, everybody expects adults to possess some degree of understanding of what is being told to them and act and apply rules with ownership and responsibility. What is specifically galling is that when push came to a shove you took up the excuse that notably rules are broken. But, earlier, had no problems argumentatively enforcing them blindly. No one had a gun to your head to do whatever you went about doing, you went about doing it anyway and then hid behind a straw-man.

Nobody has the time an energy to, as you indicate, to reason with someone at length. Especially when the other person is being unreasonably pedantic and obnoxious. Most people have a real job and more important things to do.

Edit: @runjake your point well taken and upped.

I'd far prefer in the case that an article is not well maintained that it be flagged for deletion in X months due to absence of proper care. If there is a strong community presence the article can be resurrected and recovered and Wikipedia ultimately improved and only otherwise the article deleted.

I've seen deletionism creep into articles that were very well written, very well cited and overall a great source of information. I hope you are either generalizing or I'm misunderstanding your point as otherwise this does anything but justify deletionism.

They'd have more help if they didn't go around deleting things.

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editor...

It would be interesting to look at administrators' self-reported reasons for burning out, and it is definitely interesting to look at competing models for building online encyclopedias, but you may be right that an explicitly more inclusionist policy (which allows even more content that cannot be reliably sourced and that may be simply made up by fanboys) would hasten the decline of active Wikipedia administrators and editors in general. On the whole, I have an inclusionist orientation, and still do, but after seeing many more Wikipedia articles from the inside (as a wikipedian) than I once had, I can't say that I disagree with the majority of article deletion decisions that are actually made by current Wikipedia community processes.

In what manner is the content hidden? Will it show up in search engine results? Will an anonymous user like myself see the content?

When I saw a bunch of these posts at the top of HN, I was actually expecting a better discussion, but it seems PLs fans are pretty similar to music fans when it comes to someone touching the stuff they like!

And in the other direction, you get much better discussions when there isn't a fandom involved. Most deletion debates of science and math articles end up pretty civil, with a reasonable debate about whether to merge the information somewhere, whether better sources can be found to improve the article instead of deleting it, etc. At worst, you get the one guy who wrote a vanity article about his research lab posting under multiple accounts to try to save it, but usually no mobs.