[WikiEN-l] GNAA Deleted!

Tue Nov 28 22:01:29 UTC 2006

On 11/28/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 11/28/06, Tony Jacobs <gtjacobs at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > What definition of "notable" are you using?  The only definition of that
> > word that matters at Wikipedia is: "A topic is notable if it has been
> the
> > subject of multiple, non-trivial published works whose sources are
> > independent of the subject itself."  That's not true of GNAA, ergo
> they're
> > not "notable", which simply means that it's impossible to write a
> properly
> > verifiable article about them.  We don't want to keep an unverfiable
> > article
> > around, no matter how much "consensus" may hoot and holler for it, so we
> > delete it.
> >
> > People who want to know about GNAA can still look them up at ED, which
> has
> > no problem covering topics that we eschew.
> >
>
> The problem with this trend is that it relegates certain aspects of
> internet
> culture which tend not to get press coverage into the dustbin.
>
> As much as I hate GNAA and everyone involved in it, it IS notable among
> the
> realm of internet troll activities.
>
> If we have the (harmless, real, but equally badly documented)
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt.fan.warlord entry....

The issue of valuing paper over non-paper sources, and the problems this
provides for internet topics (not to mention lots of other popular culture
issues) has been discussed a number of times.  I have seen people remove
links on the grounds that they are blogs...when it happened to be a "blog"
hosted by the book's publisher (Oxford University Press), in which the
author of the book was interviewed by the publisher's blogger.

There are reasons to put higher value on some sources than on others, but
seriously, one needs to use a modicum of common sense.  Of course on the
GNAA issue, what bothers me more is the fact that an article that survived
17 AfDs (or however many there really were) is closed after 2 days as a
delete, based, it would appear, on WP:RS rather than WP:V