This sort of behavior is not acceptable on Wikipedia (at least, according to everyone who comments on ridiculous AfD stories). As for teaching him a lesson: he was caught live. The harshness of the lesson was proportional to the amount of rage such behavior induce.
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.
If I go and nominate "Ball-peen hammer" for deletion, I'm probably going to get [called] ignorant in the AfD discussion. That doesn't mean that "Ball-peen hammer" should then be deleted.
I'm very sorry, but this is what they call "Taking things too personally." You can say that "Faux," my JS framework, is not notable. How is this an insult to me? You can say that I'm not notable. Again, how is this an insult to me?
"Notable" is not a synonym for "worthwhile," it's related to the word "popular." Saying that a language doesn't meet Wikipedia's guidelines is not a statement about the language's fans, users, or authors. It's a statement about a particular test you apply by searching the world's existing information storehouse for mentions of the subject.
The presence of an ad hominem does not make the rest of a comment worthless.
(Not to have the debate implied by my question here -- but that's the thought process, and I don't think it's unreasonable.)
The notability guidelines, as you can grasp from the name, speak to whether something has been noted, not whether it is useful. Example: My last bike used something called a Hammerschmidt crank. It was a two-speed planetary gear device that behaved like a two chainring front crank, but had all the mechanics inside a drum.
It is very useful, was featured on many OEM bicycles, and people love them. There is no Wikipedia page for it right now, just a mention on the Crankset page.
Is the Hammerchmidt notable? If we do a search, we find reviews, the manufacturer's page, and classified ads for them. It isn't notable yet by Wikipedia's rules. If you think it ought to be notable, your issue is with the rules, not with their application.
Now, I just discussed Hammerschmidt cranks and their notability or lack of same. Nothing I said says anything about their manufacturer, distributors, users, reviewers... The damn things are useful and I admire the people who make them and sell them. But once we grasp that useful != notable, we grasp that a statement about their notability != a statement about their users or inventors.
Well, no, it isn't. Many things are notable that are not "popular", or even common. Leprosy, flesh-eating bacteria, progeria, Jeffrey Dahmer.
There's also a vicious cycle here: the existence of an article on Wikipedia may lead people to not post related articles elsewhere on the web, instead relying on the WP article. That may lead in turn to the article's subject being considered insufficiently notable.
And, well, ball-peen hammers are quite notable. They probably have quite a few more practicing users than many of the languages this guy nominated. The problem with someone saying, "ball peen hammers aren't notable," is not that the creator of ball peen hammers might feel insulted. The problem is that the statement is incorrect.
I'll allow that you might have been in the right on all of your AfD flags, under some interpretation of WP policies. But I think you were wrong to do what amounts to jabbing a stick into a hornet's nest, and then wonder why you're getting stung. You stuck a %!#@ng stick into a hornet's nest, that's why.
In the case of Alice ML, it was just you and SarekOfVulcan (the admin who closed the discussion and deleted the article). Every single vote in the discussion was to keep. I'm not going to attribute false motivations to your actions as I have no idea what your actual motivation was (care to fill us in with something other than "it is consistent with WP policy"?).
As an aside, I agree that deletion was appropriate for a number of the stub articles; they had been stubs for a long time and didn't contain anything beyond "this language exists". Such articles didn't add anything to Wikipedia. Articles on languages like Alice, Nemerle and Joy might need improvement, but probably shouldn't be summarily removed.
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.
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.
I do not approve the harshness that we saw tonight, but it is easily understandable.
I can't imagine any rational person holding that viewpoint, and so in discussion with a rational person, I'd be very unlikely to argue against it without first verifying that they're actually making that claim.