[zedshaw]

My problem with you is you're going to be a professor, a profession devoted to the advancement of human knowledge and educating laymen in this knowledge, and you just erased one of the main mechanisms for disseminating computer science to the general public. You just made it harder to get people interested in programming. Amazing.

Instead of improving the pages (which any self-respecting graduate student could do over a cup of tea and a scone) you just erased them. Unilaterally. Imagine if someone at your university decided to do that to one of your papers because they just didn't like it or because some government thought it wasn't "notable" enough. Hell, your department would have a fit if that happened. I also bet your department publishes just about everything a Ph.D. candidate puts out, no matter how idiotic it is.

Yet, here you are, censoring the work of others in your own profession because of some arbitrary rules of "notability" that only work for dipshits like Lindsay Lohan and not for programming languages like Nemerle and Factor.

So yes, you are behaving like an asshole. You are probably a nice guy in person (any grown man who's into Pokemon has got to be fun), but right now, you're being a gigantic Nazi asshole.

[ugh]

Could you please not call other people “nazis” because they have a slightly different opinion?

[cabalamat]

The Nazis burnt books. Deleting articles on Wikipedia is an electronic equivalent of that.

While it's quite incendary to call someone a Nazi, I think the cap fits in this case.

[ugh]

Oh, come on. Really?

Making an editorial suggestion is not akin to burning books, not the least bit. If you are a journalist, you don’t get to call your editor a “Nazi” because she decides to not publish your story.

This comparison is stupid and offensive, it trivializes what the Nazis actually did for a cheap and inaccurate insult.

Don’t insult at all, if possible, but if you must pick something less stupid than “Nazi”. Call him “ass”, “narrow minded”, “censor”, “idiot” or whatever, I wouldn’t care at all.

[j_baker]

> Instead of improving the pages (which any self-respecting graduate student could do over a cup of tea and a scone) you just erased them. Unilaterally.

Well, technically he and an admin deleted them unilaterally. Regardless, you're correct. The focus should be on building knowledge, not tearing it down.

[namdnay]

Unilaterally? Anyone can !vote on an AFD.

[maximilianburke]

Anyone can vote on whether or not an article should be deleted but how many people actually do? I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of Wikipedia users don't know, and don't care, about Wikipedia politics.

If something is in the process of being deleted that I don't know about then I can't vote on whether or not I want it to be kept around. Wikipedia is great for jumping from link-to-link to find out new things and if the content is being deleted it's that much harder to learn. I didn't even know about the programming language Nemerle before and now the article is gone.

Knowledge shouldn't be voted on.

[cabalamat]

It isn't a vote. ("Articles for deletion" used to be called "votes for deletion", when it was a voting-based system, but that was some time ago).

[namdnay]

> I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of Wikipedia users don't know, and don't care, about Wikipedia politics

If they don't care about the "politics", they shouldn't complain if the direction chosen by the project does not suit them.

[AndyKelley]

I should make a tool that periodically scans the articles for deletion and always votes NO. I could allow anyone else to use this tool as well. Then I think the real voice of the Internet would show that we don't support deletionism!

[pbhjpbhj]

Voting against deletion means nothing without some reasoning.

[jacoblyles]

>"...you're going to be a professor, a profession devoted to the advancement of human knowledge and educating laymen in this knowledge"

Correction: a professor is a profession devoted to advancing human knowledge and then locking that knowledge behind expensive paywalls so that only elites with institutional subscriptions can afford to read it. Academia couldn't care less about the knowledge available to the average internet user. You could burn all the books in the world and they wouldn't care as long as the copy in their affiliated-persons-only library stayed safe.

[Lewisham]

...and this is why almost all academics put their papers as PDFs for free on their web sites. Have you even looked? It is times like this when I wish there was an appropriate emoticon to express an eye roll.

[fhars]

In another comment in this thread our deletionist actually mentioned being behind the ACM paywall as a relevant criterion for notability.

[jacoblyles]

It depends very much on the field. CS has the most open culture of sharing information that I know of, which it should be proud of.

[redfloatplane]

Completely off-topic, but there is: e_e

Use your newfound powers of exasperation wisely, my friend.

[wtallis]

Academics for the most point don't care about paywalls as long as they are on the right side of any paywalls. University libraries and their institutional subscriptions exist to abstract away the concept of paywalls, so that researchers only need to ask for the article and never need to worry about whether they need to pay for it.

Also, are there really all that many university libraries left that aren't open to the public?

[geekman]

Increasingly so.

At my local university (University of Melbourne) some of the libraries are closed to the public eg the Melbourne Business School Library and the Physics library. In practice you can usually sneak into the physics library, but...

Also, a lot of the journals and even books (eg Ralph Vince's latest book on risk management) are only available online now and require a university logon. So in effect those publications are closed off.

At Melbourne Uni, members of the public cannot access publications in the short-term loans area (4 hour loans).

[aneth]

> Academia couldn't care less about the knowledge available to the average internet user.

Except for just about every elite university, most of which make their courses available online for free.