Call For Halt To Wikipedia Webcomic Deletions
Posted by kdawson on Wednesday October 31, @05:16AM
from the deletionism-rampant dept.
ObsessiveMathsFreak writes “Howard Tayler, the webcomic artist of Schlock Mercenary fame, is calling on people not to donate money during the latest Wikimedia Foundation fund-raiser. This is to protest the ‘notability purges’ taking place throughout Wikipedia, where articles are being removed en-masse by what many see as overzealous admins. The webcomic community in particular has long felt slighted by the application of Wikipedia’s contentious Notability policy. Wikinews reporters have recently begun investigating this issue, but are the admins listening?”
Crossposted from my comment, which can be viewed here.
by Jazon Bladen (938809) on Wednesday October 31, @12:44PM (#21185389)
(http://www.bladenforce.com/)
Alright, I’m going to throw my lot into this. This is something I’ve been watching over the past year or so, and it’s only gotten worse, not better.
Case 1: Jenn Dolari, Closetspace and A Wish for Wings.
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Jenn Dolari was an active contributor to wikipedia, as evidenced by her contributions page. Several pieces of information in her comics’ articles were factually inaccurate, so the person that contributed that information invited her to fix it on that page. A particular group of people with administrator backing did not like this, and began a vendetta against Dolari, starting with the first VfD, followed by another which failed, so they started yet another, which succeeded. Several more AfDs came about since then, including this one, this one, and this one just because Jenn Dolari is mentioned in it. Because she was constantly accused of being a vanity editor, she has permanently quit Wikipedia and has specifically denied any permission for Wikipedia to use any of her copyrighted works.
(See also: Jenn Dolari’s Wikipedia User Page.)
Case 2: Kristofer Straub, Starslip Crisis, and “Delete Wikipedia: A Webcomics Case Study”
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After the attempted AfD of Evil Inc and Ugly Hill, Straub decided that enough was enough, and took it upon himself to perform a case study into the dynamics of Wikipedia’s deletionist mindset. He used sock puppets to submit an AfD against his own comic, Starslip Crisis, using misleading data. As Straub says himself,
“What I tried to do was take the popular point of view among Wikipedia’s editors — “delete webcomics” — and then prove that it would be accepted even under fallacious/suspicious circumstances. And it looks like I was successful.”
Only after Straub admitted of his methods of getting his article deleted, did Wikipedia review the deletion.
From just these two incidents alone, you can see that there is a blatant problem with the way Wikipedia handles deletionary policy. For more information about this, you can check out Parker Peter’s LiveJournal.
In my opinion, Wikipedia is essentially Mad Max with computers instead of motorcycles. Roaming gangs of Wikipedia users control different portions of Wikipedia, and if you dare step on their turf, ensue epic motorcycle death battle sequence.
I feel guilty about the site not being updated, so here’s an update!
Ok, not a great update, but still…
Been working on ideas like crazy, as well as getting things organized.
Hm. As for news…
Well I guess were getting closer to winter, when all these legendary games will come out. And there’s already been announcements for great games that won’t be out until NEXT year.
It turns out Hellgate London sucks (or I should say it’s a great game, it just happens that that great game that it is is Diablo II), Halo 3 is…well Halo, overhyped but not without it’s merits. Jericho is far more cartoony than Undying,
Looking forward to Mass Effect and Fallout 3…
And then games that won’t be out until next year or even later, like Spore and that Diablo-esque sci-fi post apoc wild west game with the bajillion randomized gun generator.
Have there been ANY decent RPG’s recently? I guess Soul whatever, the latest game from Nippon Ichi, might count. Heck, the only memorable RPG I’v had contact with before that was that rather inventive game about the singing robot girls (very very very anime, but it was a good game with a rather epic take on the overused “floating islands, giant tower” type setting). Had a mechanism where you “dove” into the consciousnesses of your robot girls to fix their psychological problems and thus unlock new powers for them. Rather Evangelion-esque with a bit of Paprika thrown in.
As for movies, 30 Days of Night, how was it? I liked the first graphic novel but more and more just seem to keep coming out, ala the not-so-great Silent Hill comics.
American Gangster comes out this week, for some odd reason Denzel Washington as a badass gangster has an allure to it
oooh, the most interesting movie thing I’v seen recently is that commercials have started to air advertising an upcoming Sweeney Todd movie starring Johnny Depp.
I wish we had a forum or something to discuss webcomics, as that’s a subject I could talk about all day, but I don’t participate in the Penny Arcade/PvPonline driven webcomic drama community of the internet. Ironically the PA guys and Scott Kurtz neither encourage nor participate in that stuff, but it’s mainly centered around their fandom. I guess it’s the community of people that listen to that heirarchy, and who really believe that PA and Pvponline are the most popular/best webcomics on the internet.
I simply don’t get the idea of people arguing over the digital equivalent of newspaper serials and sunday morning funnies.
I’m much more interested in the online graphic novels, which range in quality of art from clearly someone’s first attempt at drawing to epic-level proffessional art. They range from teenagers still in school trying to tell a cool story for the first time, to fan-works, to proffessionals who do it for a living, off of the merit of their art and story not on high-updating serialization and lots of merchandise, like the so called “big names”.
Really, outside of the art communities like Deviant Art that have a lot of these people, there doesnt really seem to be much internet community around the online mangas and graphic novels that don’t really qualify as the same beast as the constantly ranked sequential cartoons most people limit their webcomic experience to.
Anyways, part news part rant, that seems like a good update.
This is Coyote, signing out.
Hey guys, I’m updating the site to the newest version of WordPress. If anything is broken, just hold on.
4:19pm - UPDATE: The main site is upgraded. Now for the comic.
4:22pm - UPDATE: Comic now upgraded. Send us an e-mail report if anything was broken by the upgrade.
