User talk:Jorge Stolfi/DoW/Intro

Hi Jorge,

Nice article. I believe you missed one point, and it is a point missed by the deletionists. The deletionists seem to have not asked the question "What makes an encyclopedia useful?". I would suggest that the answer is that when you look up a topic, it is there. That is to say, the encyclopedia actually contains an article on the topic you want. This is a problem for paper encyclopedias because they have limited space. They must choose carefully what articles to include and, equally important, what articles to leave out. In contrast, Wikipedia has no practical limitations on space. This means that articles on obscure, minority interest, and less notable topics are an advantage, and is the major advantage Wikipedia can have over its paper rivals.

Therefore, the policy of deleting "non-notable" articles is actually making Wikipedia less useful. (As you will have guessed, I am not a deletionist.)

I also strongly agreed with you when you wrote:

This hosti[li]ty is manifested in several ways, including an aggressive article deletion policy and the widespread insertion of disparaging editorial tags in newbie articles.

My own experience bears this out. I no longer create new articles after a set of four, on which I had invested weeks of work, were deleted. Why should I bother? I have also suffered from gratuitous editorial tags, like this one.

Hope you liked the barnstar. Keep up the good work, HairyWombat (talk) 02:53, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

• Hi, thanks for the barnstar. I just had one of my articles deleted too, on alternative theories for the peopleing of the Americas (which used to be considered a closed issue, but has been reopened by new evidence, all in scientific journals and that). It took me a lot of work to write, and has survived several *years* of scrutiny and edits by other editors. The article was nominated on the AfD on december 27, and deleted on January 2 after half a dozen votes — by regular deletionists, of course. I have about a thousand articles on my watchlist so I cannot check every change to every article every day; and I did not get a warning on my talk page. If this is not vandalism, I don't know what is. Sigh. All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 03:55, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

You can appeal a deletion, but I don't know the procedure. Please let me know if you do this. If your article was backed by journal articles then I would have thought you had an excellent case. (It also sounds like an article I would want to read.) HairyWombat (talk) 20:51, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

What was the name of the article? — goethean ॐ 20:33, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

This is an example of the problem with reinventing Wikipedia. You've had over two years to defend your article by answering Goethean's simple question, so I can only assume it was what your description of it looks like: propaganda for the American Constitutionist ("Tea") Party. Such attacks on history should be deleted. This is why they have the WP::TRUE rule -- so expressions of blind faith in defiance of ponderous evidence get the rebuff they deserve. 198.228.204.89 (talk) 18:38, 24 March 2012 (UTC) Collin237

1. Just cause someone does not answer a question on the Wiki does not mean they are hiding something.

2. I was able to find the article name and deletion (and then the old article on a mirror). It does not appear to have anything to do with the Tea Party and is just an article on theories about pre-Amerind populations (and from a Brazilian). Most of same basic content is now in a section of another article. BTW, even if there were some Tea Part slant to the article, the way to deal with bias is fixing the article, not AFD (it's notable or not.)

TCO (talk) 14:00, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

Comment

Wonderful, well thought out and very thoughtful, therefore it will be ignored. --Antigrandiose (talk) 10:47, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

A victim of its own success?

Hi Jorge,

A good article, but maybe Wikipedia has been a victim of its own success - One of the artciles that I have been involved in was Wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. The editorial team had to battle against those who were pushing a republican line and those who wanted to include every bit of rubbish that they found in every woman's magazine. One of the tell-tale signs was a request early on to delete the article as being "Not notable". The article took 1.5 million hits on the day of the wedding - hardly "non-notable"! That, unfortunately is why we need rules. We also need a professional look and again, different editors have different viewpoints. As it is, I reverted one of your changes a few minutes ago when you inadvertently changed a UK spelling to a US spelling in an article that uses UK English. (I suspect that you are well aware of this problem, especially in respect of Brazil and Portugal).

Comments on these pages

Sorry for not replying earlier. I sometimes take long vacations from Wikipedia, which means that I will miss any comments that are posted to talk pages of my sub-pages, as they will be buried under thousands of entries in my watchlist. If you want me to read and reply to your comments, please put them in my main talk page. Thanks... --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 04:15, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Baseless assumptions

In the initial section, you make these unfounded assumptions:

• Proclaim the decline in growth can only mean "death" and nothing else
  • another random possible reason: it's the end of the initial growth phase i.e. saturation
• Assume that this "death" or whatever is unconditionally bad (thus the choice of word)
  • as per above, this can mean anything
• Draw spurious, long-winded connections between this and editor numbers and behaviour
  • while the conclusions might be true, just the article number dynamic isn't anywhere near sufficient a proof

All the following verses are tightly based on these assumptions, so there's no need to consider further arguments. Basically, this is as much wishful thinking as that of your alleged opponents. — Vano 11:26, 18 November 2015 (UTC)