Wikipedia entry for Aaron Swartz-founded PAC was deleted the day he died | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia entry for Aaron Swartz-founded PAC was deleted the day he died

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26 pointswging5 comments

It's actions like these (the deletion) which have gradually but surely eroded my goodwill towards Wikipedia. Heavens knows what the impact of the delete debate was on Aaron, or whether deletion occurred before or after he passed. But it's another straw on the back of the camel of progress.

It seems Aaron's own research showed that Wikipedia content is created by a large number of generally quiet contributors, while a few very active editors edit. It's over-zealous editors who are blackening the soul of Wikipedia. They need to be tamed, and the quiet contributors granted more power, somehow.

One of the users involved in those small-scale, under-the-radar WP deletion proceedings, RightCowLeftCoast, seems to be an active member of WikiProject Conservatism. Can't help wondering whether the stated reason ("subject appears to fail notability") was a smokescreen.

Wikipedia has a cancer that deletes information.

For example there was an article on an old BBS game and the only references were to Boardwatch Magazine, web sites no longer in operation, and a user manual made by an independent third party. It was put up for deletion and 15 people voted keep and 4 voted delete and it was deleted. Someone cannot do math at Wikipedia.

I found this happened to other articles. I was quoting Eric S. Raymond on "The Art of Unix Programming" about the history of the GUI and how IBM licensed the Amiga GUI from Commodore http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#os... http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2Warp.html for the Workbench GUI that IBM based the Workplace Shell on. But it was deleted in the OS/2 and Amiga article because Mr. Raymond was 'non-notable' and the editor who reverted my changed claimed he did not have a copy of his book to verify it, so it wasn't a valid source.

Update: Four hours later, the article's back. And if someone wanted to try again, they'd have to do a lot better than claim non-notability or lack of sources as below:

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

Both of the people calling for the deletion of the article about Demand Progress are conservative/libertarian. One is even a member of American Legion.

This appears to be a partisan issue, but of course their calls for deletion quote Wikipedia policy.

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