[WikiEN-l] help me

Wed May 19 11:56:14 UTC 2004

You are definitely in the right place, althought there are other right
places such as the Villge Pump.

On the surface (I am no programmer, but many who read this list are) your
arguement is persuasive, but so is the arguement of your opponents who take
the position that the level of detail you are going into is inappropriate
for an ecyclopedia.

However in many other areas, even more detailed expositions are present and
planned for encyclopedia, generally, no town is so small, no King so
obscure, and especially, no bird so extinct that it does not deserve an
article.

We have a policy, "Don't bite the newbies", but, it is not necessarily
followed in spirit. In fact, in your case, the excellence of your article
and its very sophistication perhaps works against the policy, as the
reaction is more to the imposition of that sophistication rather than to the
cluelessness of a newbie.

The suggestion that the article, and others like it, ought to be moved to
Wikibooks is one you might take seriously. I see the debate on VfD (Votes
for Deletion) as pretty typical and at this point about evenly divided.
Which means your article at worst might end up in Wikibooks. This is often
the fate of howto material.

The piling on engaged in by Beelzebubs and DavidWBrooks is, of course,
inexcusable. I have restored your stub (perhaps it was deleted more due to
its stub nature than its content) and suggest you finish working on it, if
you have any time and energy with all your other articles up for deletion.

This imperious comment:

> "But I'd recommend you leave listing them to users with good
> contribution records, and the same with discussing this
> one. AFAIK all the many articles you have written so far
> have been listed for deletion and will be deleted as
> unencyclopedic. IMO you aren't entitled to vote on
> VfD. Sorry." Andrewa....

constitutes a serious and sustained newbie mauling. I suppose the idea is
that you should edit a few hundred articles about small towns in America
before you jump into the serious stuff.

I hope this helps. A few serious and valuable contributors have been put
off, and, eventually driven away, (usually by butting heads with our
amateurish qualities) but I hope you are not one of them and will continue
to participate in our "Newbie training and socialization process". Made that
quote up, but I hope you get the idea.

As far as getting any apologies, considering the damage you have done to the
reputation of your tormentors, doubt you can expect any.

You might make your user page [[User:Eric B. and Rakim]] a bit more serious.
Perhaps a slight part of your difficulty is due to your joking around there.

Fred

> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 19 May 2004 10:43:44 +0000
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] help me
> 
> Dear mailing list readers,
> 
> I don't know if this is the proper place to turn for
> help. If it isn't, then please tell me because the matter is
> urgent. Wikipedia is a fine resource and contains very much
> useful information. Reading Wikipedia is fun, and every day
> since I discovered it I've learnt a thing or two by reading
> it. But its coverage about programming and computer software
> is a little thin I think. Well, I'm quite knowledgeable when
> it comes to computer related topics and I love to write. So,
> therefore I took it upon me to fix this defiancy.
> 
> Big mistake it seems, some people didn't like that at all.
> 
> Especially not a user by the name RickK, who a few minutes
> after I had written an initial version of "XFree86 logfile"
> added it to a page "Votes for Deletion" on which he is
> currently holding a vote whether that page should be destroyed
> or not. Naturally, I protested strongly, because I couldn't
> and still cannot understand why he wants to delete that
> page. He didn't try to communicate with me and just wrote
> "Huh?" and then when I asked him why he thought that that
> page should be deleted he answered "It isn't discussing
> anything encyclopedic. I THINK it describes a file format,
> but I'm not really sure."
> 
>> From that it became obvious to me that he hadn't even read
> the article because it should be pretty damn obvious to
> anyone that an article titled "XFree86 logfile" is about the
> XFree86 logfile. And that I told him that, whereafter he
> listed all other six articles I had written:
> 
> glDrawElements, glVertexPointer, glDrawArrays, glEnable,
> GL_QUADS, fbdevhw
> 
> And wrote: "I'll ask again. Do we really want articles on
> subroutines?" Which is really funny since only the four
> first documents subroutines.
> 
> Then quite a few other users also said that they wanted
> those articles destroyed. No reasons where given except for
> pointless platitudes like "not encyclopedia material" and
> "Wikipedia is not (should not be) an API reference".
> 
> I tryid arguing and, no offense intened, but it was totally
> wasted time. Those functions are the essential cornerstones
> for modern 3d graphics.. Have to realize that some people
> just have a very different view of things than me. However,
> I refuse to accept that Wikipedia in general would have such
> a twisted view of things because then there wouldn't be
> 250,000+ articles here.
> 
> Then I wrote the beginning of an article named pcidata,
> which is a X module for displaying PCI information. Two
> minutes after it was submitted a user named Beelzebubs wrote
> "Speedy deletion" on it and a minute later it was destroyed
> by DavidWBrooks. It made me quite angry because I had no way
> whatsoever to even object. And from looking at their
> respective user pages I deducted that none of them is
> interested in Linux and therefore (probably) has no idea
> what pcidata is.
> 
> It seems like Wikipedia really isn't a very newbie friendly
> page. Well, I can't exclude UtherSRG's very friendly
> message on my talk page. Is this some kind of hazing or are
> regular users treated like this too? Seems like a calculated
> move - tease the new guy til they fight back and then accuse
> them. Especially this little gem by the same user that also
> accused me of being rude:
> 
> "But I'd recommend you leave listing them to users with good
> contribution records, and the same with discussing this
> one. AFAIK all the many articles you have written so far
> have been listed for deletion and will be deleted as
> unencyclopedic. IMO you aren't entitled to vote on
> VfD. Sorry." Andrewa....
> 
> I need help. Because I don't know what I should do. Either
> it is so that my work and expertise isn't appreciated or
> even accepted by Wikipedia. If so, I will leave peacefully
> and not return. If not so, I would expect an apology from
> the perpetrators and that my work is not destroyed.
> 
> //Björn (aka. Eric B. and Rakim)
> 
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