Monday, October 20, 2008

Deletionpedia: Home for the Ultratrivial, or Bulwark Against Wikipedia's Censorship?

By Nicholas Stix

I just stumbled across Deletionpedia. No, I did not make up the name.

Deletionpedia is an archive of about 63,540 pages which have been deleted from the English-language Wikipedia.

Deletionpedia is not a wiki: you cannot edit the pages uploaded here. An automated bot uploads pages as they are deleted from Wikipedia.


I was looking for a valentine one of my fans at the SPLC, Casey Sanchez, had written about me, and found instead my disappeared Wikipedia biography.

Like most everything on the Web, Deletionpedia is a mixed blessing. It is not a full counterweight to the wikicensors at The Pretend Encyclopedia (TPE), because it only reproduces entries that have been banned in their entirety. However, the wikicensors more typically work by censoring the truth, and inserting lies into entries, rather than “disappearing” entries in toto. They went to the trouble of disappearing my entire entry, because a number of TPE gauleiter are obsessed with me, and seek to suppress public knowledge about my work. I’ll name them later.

I’m hardly the only one the gauleiter are obsessed with. They are constantly calling for the deletion of new entries on right-of-center journalists and intellectuals, and when they don’t disappear the entries wholesale, they engage in their usual dirty tricks, as mentioned above. For a record of some of their chicanery in this regard, just check the biographical entries for conservative writers that editor href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Comradesandalio>Comradesandalio has worked on, and see how many have been nominated for deletion.

And when the gauleiter don’t have the nerve to immediately call for an entry’s deletion, they get cute, and claim that it lacks “notability,” as one gauleiter did only five hours after Comradesandalio started the entry for the brilliant political writer who works under the pseudonym, “Takuan Seiyo.” (For a prime sample of “Seiyo’s” intellectual and moral power, see “The Case of the ‘Disappeared’ Subprime Minority Borrower.” (Full disclosure: I am a VDARE contributor. However, I have never published under the name, “Takuan Seiyo.”)

I was ready to say that Deletionpedia a mixed blessing, in that, due to their libelous character, some entries at The Pretend Encyclopedia really do need to be eliminated, but DP’s founder, David Batley, aka physics dave aka TPE User: H2g2bob, already anticipated that issue, and goes out of his way not to preserve libelous TPE entries. If only TPE would show such care to prevent libel!

Leave it to an Ars Technica blogger named Nate Anderson to completely miss the point of Deletionpedia: “Deletionpedia: Where entries too trivial for Wikipedia live on.”

I was tempted to do a background check on Anderson, to determine whether he reduced Deletionpedia to the hoarding of trivia out of ignorance or political hackery, but then I caught myself. Nate who? This guy’s really too … trivial.

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