Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Nerd Boy (2nd nomination)

Year of the Pig
To put this in a perspective, my first edit was creating this article. That was in 2004, I think. Back then it was improbable that a webcomic that was running for 4 years with more than 600 issues would be ever deleted. It was even more improbable that 3 other Wikipedias would cover a topic that is missing from the English one (this one for WP:MEA perhaps). Enter 2007. What we have here is one badly written guideline (WP:RS) used as a reason to delete a potentially useful article, making Wikipedia less comprehensive and less useful.

I can just foresee some well-written article about some 19th century painting being deleted because "its not mantioned on teh internets". Of course some art experts (those who created the article) will chime in, saying how this painting is important work of the foo art movement and so on, but their voices will get lost in the mass of uneducated. Wikipedia was probably the only resource on the Internet that covered this work of art, but now it is no more. I think this comparison exactly describes what's going on here. People who know nothing about ASCII art somehow feel they have something to add to the discussion, and their opinions are for some reason treated the same as the opinions of the experts (that's me!). The unwashed masses win, but that's not how it was before. Being an active participiant of VfD (back when it was called VfD), I saw many times how people changed their opinions under the influence of the expert's opinion. Now there may be no "vote" word in the title, but AfD discussions are being treated as simple votes.

The problem in my opinion is that, in the effort to thwart the social networking (aka community) aspect of Wikipedia, we got the community of people who just cannot collaborate together for the good of Wikipedia. Everyone's pursuing their little agenda, which has nothing to do with the common goals. We have these guys who want to delete every single fair use image (because apparently it's harder to make forks with them present. Like we need more forks). Then we have these guys who want to delete all articles without "reliable" sources (because apparently you need secondary sources to prove that a comic had more than 600 issues. What idiocy). These forces are destructive and there's nothing to counteract them. They are never going to destroy Wikipedia though, I hope. That's why I'm still staying on the project even though I lost almost all interest of contributing. I think it jumped the shark around the time when Kelly Martin and Tony Sidaway "quit" (both are back, apparently). It just looked like everything is turning into farce. Just when I wanted to make a comeback I see that two of my articles are listed for AfD (one was kept). From what I've seen in other places, things didn't get better. In fact, I'm pretty disgusted at the current state of Wikipedia. Just look at Esperanza MfD: this is definitely not a healthy community. Well, I don't think I have anything more to say. If you agree/disagree with what I wrote, reply here or on my talk page.  Grue  09:20, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Sucks
Hey Grue. I discovered today that the Nerd Boy article is gone, so I checked the AfD and saw your valiant attempts at keeping it. I must say that I wasn't as saddened by the deletion as I was by your decision to quit editing. Then again, you wrote the article, I just wrote Nerd Boy. I'd probably quit too if I wrote an article that got deleted for no apparent reason, especially if it's another symptom of the Wikipedia community going down the drains. Too bad, I like this site, but nowadays the talk pages are starting to look like MySpace. *shudder* I hope that's not the beginning of the end. iaoth @ 13:55, 14 January 2007 (UTC)