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Not unexpected, but whenever something like this happens, to me the real tragedy is the level of animosity and vitriol shown by the "victims".
I fear that this issue has become less about fixing broken Wikipedia policies that encourage people like Chris to delete articles, and more about "teaching him a lesson".
The amount of ad hominem attacks in the original story is much higher than anything I'd expect from HN. And, considering HN is self-policed in a lot of ways, I think the issue needs to be pointed out.
Even after this "reversal", I'm not sure he understands why people were angry about his AfDs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I repeat myself, but: "The damage is already done."
You're not interested in an apology... You don't care that he stopped. What exactly do you want from him then?
A sincere apology would involve 1) apologizing/admitting wrong-doing and 2) undoing the damage. I could certainly settle for only the second.
"Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages?" Amen to that. Others have said it many times before and it is still true: Wikipedia's notability guidelines would benefit from being fixed. It's rather annoying to note that what this guy was doing was within the l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly my point. He's sorry that he got called out, nothing more.
So? Isn't the most important thing that he's stopping?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle
I might just be seeing a cached version, though.
edit: grr, I cannot reply to you, but yes, that was my point exactly: he could request a deletion review.
Problem with wikipedia is that it does not have a target audience defined clearly enough to answer these questions easily. And as with many sites, except for the specific use case it was designrped for, it's not useful. For eacmple could a student learn any calculus from the calculus page?
We should stop trying force wikipedia to be the ideal resource for everything, as it's clearly impossible. There are better mediums for that.
Not unexpected, but whenever something like this happens, to me the real tragedy is the level of animosity and vitriol shown by the "victims".
Power imbalances tend to produce that emotional response. Popular revolt follows, especial when food prices go up. Wait, scratch that last bit.
When I saw a bunch of these posts at the top of HN, I was actually expecting a better discussion, but it seems PLs fans are pretty similar to music fans when it comes to someone touching the stuff they like!
And in the other direction, you get much better discussions when there isn't a fandom involved. Most deletion debates of science and math articles end up pretty civil, with a reasonable debate about whether to merge the information somewhere, whether better sources can be found to improve the article instead of deleting it, etc. At worst, you get the one guy who wrote a vanity article about his research lab posting under multiple accounts to try to save it, but usually no mobs.