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cedillatoday at 10:28 AM3 repliesview on HN

I'll never understand the amount of vitriol Wikipedia volunteers must receive. Why is the deletion (or even deletion proposal) regarded as such a heinous act that people feel the need to attack and bully others?

I find this kind of behaviour and rethoric wholly unacceptable.


Replies

leejotoday at 10:47 AM

> Why is the deletion (or even deletion proposal) regarded as such a heinous act that people feel the need to attack and bully others?

FWIW I don't see this as an attack (with, perhaps, the exception of a couple of comments in the linked thread) and posted the link to the reddit thread as I see it more as an interesting observation around the myriad issues facing "legacy" languages and communities. To wit:

* Google appears to be canon for finding secondary sources, according to the various arguments in the deletion proposals, yet we're all aware of how abysmal Google's search has been for a while now.

* What's the future of this policy given the fractured nature of the web these days, walled gardens, and now LLMs?

* An article's history appears to be irrelevant in the deletion discussion: the CPAN page (now kept) had 24 years of history on Wikipedia, with dozens of sources, yet was nominated for deletion.

* Link rot is pervasive, we all knew this, but just how much of Wikipedia is being held up by the waybackmachine?

* Doesn't this become a negative feedback cycle? Few sources exist, therefore we remove sources, therefore fewer sources exist.

show 1 reply
pellatoday at 10:37 AM

Consider the other perspective: how should Perl programmers feel when Google's index becomes the main criterion for what is considered important or not? This creates a circular dependency that can erase genuine technical contributions from the historical record.

ptrl600today at 12:19 PM

Because it puts the history of the article behind a lock

I wonder if there are any privileged Wikipedia accounts who have defected and are doing a sci-hub thing.