Wikipedia: Articles for Deletion/Minecraft (2010)

It has a detailed description of the file header, and C code samples to help decode it. That's awesome! But there used to be a note saying basically "this should be removed and put somewhere else, and someone did remove it (click View history) but then someone put it back. I imagine if this wasn't such an obscure subject (it's a music file format used in a few Sega games around the early 2000s that was never visible to end users) the deletionists would have gotten their hands on it years ago.

I think the reason they do this is the same reason forum mods and discord mods act like they do: For some people this kind of thing is fun. It's like a game of whack-a-mole or something, trying to catch them. People do it on stackexchange too, e.g. I've seen questions get voted to be closed because they think it's too complicated to answer (for them). (Why not just leave it without answers until/unless someone wants to?) And I've done it on discord servers before when I was like 13, there was this server for basically support with hacked nintendo consoles and they had a rule against piracy so you would sort of interrogate people to see if they were using pirated games, and it really was kind of fun to "catch" them. Not very proud of it now of course.

Further reading: https://gwern.net/inclusionism

Which has always made me wonder how to do it right. Or if it's even possible to do it right. Perhaps some iron law governs a project becoming impossible past a certain number of people involved. Maybe smaller subject specific sites are actually the only possibility?

Or maybe I'm just holding on to the dream of the order internet. I don't know. I'd like to know. But I wouldn't trust whatever answer to the question was on Wikipedia.