The charms of wikipedia

From Driscollwiki

Baker, N. (2008) "The charms of wikipedia." The New York Review of Books, 55:4, March 20. Retrieved from: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131

• Review of Broughton, J. (2008) Wikipedia: the missing manual. O'Reilly.

"It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundskeeper. Some brought very fancy professional metal rakes, or even back-mounted leaf-blowing systems, and some were just kids thrashing away with the sides of their feet or stuffing handfuls in the pockets of their sweatshirts, but all the leaves they brought to the pile were appreciated. And the pile grew and everyone jumped up and down in it having a wonderful time. And it grew some more, and it became the biggest leaf pile anyone had ever seen anywhere, a world wonder. And then self-promoted leaf-pile guards appeared, doubters and deprecators who would look askance at your proffered handful and shake their heads, saying that your leaves were too crumpled or too slimy or too common, throwing them to the side. And that was too bad. The people who guarded the leaf pile this way were called "deletionists.""

• Wikipedia was "the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educatated."
• A place for people to "hash it all out"

Baker's experience of deletion

"But the work that really drew me in was trying to save articles from deletion. This became my chosen mission. Here's how it happened. I read a short article on a post-Beat poet and small-press editor named Richard Denner, who had been a student in Berkeley in the Sixties and then, after some lost years, had published many chapbooks on a hand press in the Pacific Northwest. The article was proposed for deletion by a user named PirateMink, who claimed that Denner wasn't a notable figure, whatever that means. (There are quires, reams, bales of controversy over what constitutes notability in Wikipedia: nobody will ever sort it out.) Another user, Stormbay, agreed with PirateMink: no third-party sources, ergo not notable."

• Baker asked, "What harm does it do [...] to keep [?]"
• Noted that poets frequently publish only in chapbooks
  • Therefore exposing a weekness in Notability
• "I had become an inclusionist"
  • Suggests that Wales is also inclusionist... not sure this is accurate?
• Cites 2007 as a period of widespread deletionist activity
  • web-comics purge of 2006