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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

I came across a huge article on some magazine marked for deletion the other day. The amount of work that had gone into the article was extensive, and it made me sad. While my little article about a small pile of sand in the middle of nowhere has ironically been translated into nine languages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeqertaq_Avannarleq

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I agree. Why throw away perfectly good work out of some bizarre idea about "notability?" What's notable now is now what will be notable in the future.

Stop the destruction! End this dumb rule and make Wikipedia truly open to all.

"Notability" is a weapon used by many editors to get rid of entries that go against their views. I've seen it used to keep off pages for highly-selling authors who hold contrary views to certain viewpoints even though they are better-known and more highly cited than authors who advocate to those certain viewpoints who get to keep their pages. No one should be able to gatekeep in this way, and there should not be anyone who can claim a page and make it theirs, keeping off any and all edits or challenges by others.

I've seen it getting used against... games in particular language

Same game in a one language can be extremely notable and well known to everyone, while in other it'd get deleted without a trace.

Sometimes it feels like "racism" based on countries (countrism?)

> Sometimes it feels like "racism" based on countries (countrism?)

I'd call it national chauvinism.

jingoism

A lot of languages span several races or countries.

As far as I understand, this idea of notability also adversely impacts science publishing, it's not published by reputable journals unless it's notable, which skews incentives and also means there's probably some useful information out there left to someone else to rediscover.

I wish there was an easier way to find deleted articles. You can see all versions of an article but if it's gone there seems to be no way to see anything.

This is by design. A lot of articles, especially recently created ones, get deleted because they consist of material which is legally problematic (e.g. text which is a copyright violation, which is libelous, which violates someone's privacy, etc).

Doesn't that use a different deletion mechanism? Afaik you can still see "normally" deleted edits and articles if you have the revision link, but those who have been deleted for legal reasons are wiped from history and their revision or edit link are blanked out

> Doesn't that use a different deletion mechanism?

Generally not. There is a separate process called "oversight" [1] which behaves the way you're describing, but it can only be invoked by a very small number of privileged users, and is only used in extreme cases.

[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Oversight_policy

There used to be deletionpedia.org but it has gone dormant (again)

Probably because you exploit this. Do this a bunch in some what that leans towards whatever your agenda is and eventually one of those articles will get a bunch of hits and attention before anyone considers revising it.

Wikipedia should allow more articles to have sections for viewpoints from different biases and agendas.

Nothing is destroyed; the person who wrote the article can ask an admin to get its text back so they can publish it elsewhere. I don’t get this "Wikipedia should host everything" mentality: if you disagree with the rules, just publish your work somewhere else. The number of articles need to be manageable, so rules are needed.

surely if an article exists and is shown to be being poorly maintained, then perhaps it's worthy of dormancy or maybe deletion. why do it pre-emptively?

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