Wikipedia, DTE, and Animal Buddies
So, the Death To The Extremist article on Wikipedia, which for the record I’ve never touched, has been “marked for deletion” because DTE is apparently not notable due to a too-low Alexa rank.
I wouldn’t really mind, except this seems to be part of a mini-vendetta against articles about Web comics. Comixpedia comments on the deletion of the article on Attitude 3 (which DTE was featured in) and Jeff Rowland, who is notable just by virtue of being incredibly awesome, also has some good things to say.
This could spark a larger discussion of what constitutes notability in today’s world, but mainly I can’t believe web comic article are being considered for deletion while Wikipedia has a 3000+ word article on Donkey Kong’s animal buddies (complete with a discussion on why Yoshi is not technically an animal buddy). I’m a rabid gamer and I didn’t even know Donkey Kong had animal buddies.
2chey said,
March 22, 2007 @ 12:57 pm
I think Scott at PVP and some other people did a whole podcast on this subject a few weeks back, just in case you missed it. And have to agree DTE should stay considering the comparatively minute trivia available on wikipedia.
Matt said,
March 22, 2007 @ 10:02 pm
Oh, man. I started that article. It’s my largest wikipedia contribution to date.
fluffy said,
March 25, 2007 @ 5:31 pm
Wikipedia is so retarded. Every single episode of South Park has its own detailed article. There’s huge articles about Tails (from Sonic the Hedgehog) which talk about every single version of his backstory and what it means in a greater literary context.
I use Wikipedia for looking up pop culture stuff and, on rare occasion, reminders of various mathematics stuff that I already knew but couldn’t quite remember the equations for. And often their equations are useless because they won’t define the units that go into the various parts anyway (like whether something in a physics equation refers to a tangent velocity or radians per second, for example).
The only reason Wikipedia’s even worth worrying about is because they’ve now gotten the #1 search result for basically anything you can search about. They have done an incredible job of gaming Google.
chad said,
March 27, 2007 @ 5:48 am
It’s also a little mind-boggling because of the way wikipedia is commonly used– it’s not as if there are a limited number of pages to be crammed between two covers. I don’t go looking for good (read: notable) comics via wikipedia– if I want to read a new comic I find the “links” section of comics I already like to be a much more reliable method. So when I do use wikipedia it is typically following a link from a webcomic to its own wiki page, out of curiosity. It is also ridiculous that a major internet thing is delteing documentation of people’s legitimate personal effort while maintaining (as you noted) slavish detail when it comes to the eighth generation of, say, pokemon.
Tobu said,
April 1, 2007 @ 12:22 pm
I too have encountered the notability police. It goes like that: find something, want to learn more on wikipedia, do some edits, check back in a few months, and pfuit, you get to read the deletion logs.
Even an alexa rank of 20k (it is at 4k recently) didn’t help.