Tom Preston-Werner (this page has been deleted)
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
It's a verdict on the quality of the Wikipedia article. In this case, the deletion says, "the article that was here did not explain why Tom Preston-Werner was an appropriate subject for a Wikipedia article". Wikipedia articles about living people that don't even say why the subject is notable are subject to automatic deletion, for reasons I explained to 'tzs downthread.
This is a problem with a straightforward solution. Create a new draft of a Tom Preston-Werner article, with a clear (but dry, factual, and assiduously cited) explanation in 2 sentences or less in the first graf of the article for why Tom Preston-Werner is notable. Use the "new article wizard" to do this.
A slightly more aggressive way to respond to this deletion would be to take the deletion itself to Wikipedia Deletion Review (DRV); the DRV page has extensive details about how to do that.
Be aware before you do this that many of Tom Preston-Werner's best-known accomplishments are already the subjects of Wikipedia articles, and that the editors of Wikipedia might reasonably reject a new article about him if it adds no notable facts to Wikipedia's preexisting coverage of his work.
The downside to writing a new draft is that the draft might be wasted effort if it merely recapitulates Wikipedia's coverage of Gravatar and Github.
The downside to taking the deletion to DRV is that you might end up litigating the decision to delete the article, which, if the original article was really bad (unsourced, no claim to notability) is probably a losing argument.
Edit: His LinkedIn profile http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tom-preston-werner/4/122/382
> 19:09, 25 October 2012 TexasAndroid (talk | contribs) deleted page Tom Preston-Werner (A7: No explanation of the subject's significance (real person) (TW))
is this a form of censorship or am i tilting at windmills?
A7 = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CSD#A7
I also do not have a Wikipedia article (despite a few peoples' random attempts to make one for me, and despite, to be entirely un-humble for a moment, having many more references about myself available online than mojombo) for what I will assume are similar reasons: if you are known in the greater world for only a single thing, even if you are known in smaller circles for a couple or a few things, Wikipedia prefers to have you merged into the article on that thing, rather than having a separate article for you.
Always funny (and sad) when they get it this wrong. Jason Scott speaks of it better than anyone else:
The article's not in Google's cache anymore, but as far as I can tell from the snippet, it apparently consisted only of the sentence: "Tom Preston-Werner is the creator of Gravatar and co-founder/CEO of GitHub." That's more information than I knew from reading the headline of this post, but it's a far cry from an encyclopedia article. I don't see what's lost by deleting it until someone's willing to put in the effort to write something substantial.
He's mentioned as creator of Gravatar and co-creator of Github in their respective Wikipedia articles. When someone is mentioned as a prominent figure in connection with something that is Wikipedia-worthy, it is quite natural for someone reading that article to wonder "what else has this guy done?" and want to click his name to find out. Now people who ask that question have to resort to the search box.
Deleting articles like this also, I suspect, reduces the chances that someone will put in the effort to make a more substantial article. Someone thinking of doing so will see that there once was an article and it was deleted, which will discourage them as they might worry that their work too will be deleted. Better, I think, to leave it there as a seed from which a more substantial article might grow.
The problem with stub articles about people that serve only to map a person to every Wikipedia subject they've touched is WP:BLP.
To sum that up: every article about a living person has to meet a higher standard of "not being wrong about that person", because when Wikipedia lists something wrong about (say) Tom Preston-Werner, it's plastering that wrongness at the top of every Google SERP, and this tends to piss people off. For obvious reasons, BLP articles are also a magnet for the most insidious kind of vandalism WP deals with: negative claims about real people that are difficult or impossible to refute "automatically", which is how virtually all vandalism on WP is handled. WP BLP articles thus incur a liability for the project.
Often, that liability is more than offset by the value of the article itself. But here, it seems like much of the value of a T.P-W article is simply in making it slightly easier to search for T.P-W in WP. But WP already does a pretty good job of doing that. Marginal value, maximum liability.
As an aside: I'm not sure you're entitled to be comfortable with Wikipedia's role. They didn't ask your permission to start the project; they just did it. The Wikipedia project, it seems to me, is entitled to set its own norms. If you don't like them, start a competing project. There's a whole big Internet out there to build on top of.
Many of the problems hackers seem to have with Wikipedia seem more like problems hackers have with encyclopedias. For instance, hackers want facts and ideas that they can verify from first principles to have a home on Wikipedia, but encyclopedias are never supposed to be venues for original research (they're supposed to be guides to the existing research). So, before you chime in and say "Wikipedia has an insurmountable first-mover advantage as the Internet's encyclopedia", ask, "do we want to be investing the content we're hoping to build in an encyclopedia, or do we want to create some kind of new venue that wouldn't even compete with Wikipedia but instead augment it, instead"?