Saturday, June 29, 2013

Deletion is out of control on Wikipedia

I have been a Wikipedian for many years and have made some important edits. You can view my Usertalk page to view what I feel is the problem. I have made a number of edits, some of them are major, like my edits after the 2012 election and preventing the deletion of this page which I feel proud of, and have translated multiple pages of Central European royalty to English. To date I have made 478 edits, which I hope to expand further. I am active on the English, German, and Spanish versions of all Wikimedia websites. I visit Wikipedia every single day when I have a question and it has been able to answer most of my questions, or point to me to another reputable site to get good information. I created the page for listing Occupy protest locations.

The biggest problem with Wikipedia today is its deletion policy. There are seven pages I have made in the past few years, and two of them were put up for speedy deletion immediately. The first was a list of occupy locations which they put up for deletion pretty much as soon as I created it. It is now sourced with over 285 references and is listed on 5 different portals. Even though it took place on every continent it was immediately proposed for deletion.

The other page that was nominated for speedy deletion and was actually deleted was an article on a mid-20th century businessman who was the CEO of the proxy company of General Motors that bought out streetcar systems across the United States, a chapter in our history that is mostly forgotten. With such a clear connection to such a big event (given that it changed the layout of every major city in the United States, which I think is extremely important) he was nominated for speedy deletion immediately, despite being more important than the 645,000 low-importance biography articles. I feel like this was probably politically motivated and being an administrator he pulled the trigger too fast to give the article a chance to grow, it also went against the policy that if an article claims notability (which my article did) it should not be deleted! There was no one to check this massive power, so the article was deleted and I left Wikipedia for half a month since I felt so upset, which for me is a very long time to not change something.

I propose an amendment to Wikipedia's deletion policy. Speedy deletion needs the nomination of 10 administrators to be effective, and needs to get enough administrators in 7 days for the deletion to go through. This would make Wikipedia better and make me more inclined to start pages since I will know my work will not be for naught.

I love Wikipedia, and am proud to be a Wikipedian.

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