The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

For those wondering about the backstory, I went and looked at the history of the deleted page.<p>The article for Jessie Stricchiola was created by account "Stricchiola" in November 2009. The commit message: "Added article for search industry pioneer Jessie Stricchiola". That account made only one other significant edit, which was to link the Jessie Stricchiola article into the first paragraph of "Search Engine Marketing".<p>Within 15 minutes, Wikipedians marked the article as insufficiently referenced, a probable conflict of interest, and possibly lacking notability. Stricchiola edited the article for the next few days, ignored the warnings, and eventually stopped editing. Other than minor fixes from Wikipedians, the article was basically untouched until September 2009, when user Cantaloupe2 nominated it for deletion discussion.<p>So as far as I can tell, a search engine marketing person wrote a self-promotional article about herself. Wikipedians immediately warned that the article had a number of issues, all of which she (and everybody else in the world) ignored for nearly 2 years. Somebody eventually noticed; Wikipedians discussed it and decided the article was unsalvageable.

His case for the notability of his friend doesn't seem to add anything that hadn't already been considered by the Wikipedians already, and his attitude was monstrously shitty. Especially his reaction to the guy/girl that removed his comments on the page that said not to leave comments on it, saving them on his "user page" with a helpful message about the process to get the debate, which was already over, reopened.<p>I hate the tone of this. He knows what should be in Wikipedia, and what they should consider notable under their standards, yet feels put upon by having to know what a "talk page" or "deletion review" is, and assaulted by being informed of a talk page being created for him. In turn, he assaults the random person who tried to help him with his goal by saving his work and giving him directions with more than a half dozen paragraphs of angry, condescending tl;dr like he was reading his list of grievances to the King of Wikipedia.

First of all, the author is wrong. Someone saying "Hey, I know that person, they're an expert on X," does not mean they belong <i>in an encyclopedia.</i> Furthermore, a sizeable group of people already had a discussion on whether the person meets <i>Wikipedia's standards</i> and decided that they do not.<p>Now, the author feels entitled to barge in <i>without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works,</i> and complain that it's too hard to find the right place to go and complain. The author even managed to <i>complain</i> when someone helpfully pointed out that he went to the wrong place to revise a <i>pointless and already settled argument</i>.<p>Seriously, this is a Wikipedia success story. If this person had been allowed to just barge in and trample Wikipedia's policies on who is notable, despite having zero knowledge of how Wikipedia works, that would have been a Wikipedia failure.<p>If the author had just been willing to spend half an hour learning about Wikipedia's policies instead of bitching on a blog, and figured out how to revive an already-settled issue, he could have successfully managed to waste people's time on this. But no. "I demand to be listened to NOW, and if I'm not, Wikipedia is Closed and Unfriendly."

Just the latest victim of the deletionist forces. This is the reason I, and many many other people have given up on contributing to Wikipedia altogether.<p>Jason Scott has a very eloquent description of the problem [1],[2], and Wikipedia's failure in addressing it several years ago; nothing has changed since then, and I doubt it will any time soon, since the Wikipedia administration sees no problem with the status quo. It's sad.<p>[1] <a href="http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808" rel="nofollow">http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.cow.net/transcript.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.cow.net/transcript.txt</a><p>[3] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...</a>

There's a lot of Wikipedia I think should be more transparent or more approachable. But deletion discussions aren't really one of them.<p>Deciding what really fits in an encyclopedia isn't simple. Wikipedia has spent literally a decade working out a set of rules that balances utility, fairness, quality, and maintainability. Those rules will inevitably seem bureaucratic and opaque to people who haven't worked on a number of articles and then really considered the problem.<p>Deletion discussions are perennial magnets for non-participants who believe that they or their (friend|band|ancestor|website) belong in Wikipedia. They are inevitably upset. Worse, in Pauli's phrase, they aren't even wrong: they start with the premise the article should be kept and then say whatever they think will let them win.<p>In this case, the bloggy ranter doesn't get basic Wikipedia fundamentals. E.g. that Wikipedia isn't about what's <i>true</i>, it's about what's <i>verifiable</i>[1]. Suppose he thinks that his pal is the most important person ever. He might be right, but what matters is what can be proven from reliable sources[2].<p>Making deletion review more approachable to the personally outraged would certainly increase the number of reviews, but it wouldn't materially change the number of articles kept. What it would do is waste a lot of valuable editor and admin time.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:V" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:V</a> [2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS</a>

"Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters."<p>-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola":<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2011_September_23" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...</a><p>Deletions include:<p>* The "vice editor in chief" of a Japanese anime magazine<p>* A list of episodes for a TV show that never aired<p>* Articles about a no-name iPhone game, and also a no-name video editing tool, presumably both written by the authors of the programs<p>* A promo for a not-yet-released book<p>* An article about "Rickstar", a musical artist who had apparently self-released one song<p>* A strategy guide for The Sims 3<p>* A bio of a junior league hockey player (albeit one with an awesome name)<p>* An article about a youth football team<p>... and it just keeps going on like that.<p>This particular article was motivated by the deletion of "Jessie_Stricchiola". Let's look at her AfD:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jessie_Stricchiola" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...</a><p>Where we learn:<p>* This is an article about an SEO consultant.<p>* It contained a promotional link to the SEO consultant's book.<p>* That SEO consultant had been quoted in a number of stories, but never written <i>about</i> in any of those stories; the only reliable information to be gleaned from any source about her was "once gave a quote about click fraud to a trade press journalist" (or in one case a reporter at WaPo).<p>It took <i>two weeks</i> for Wikipedia to determine that this article should be deleted. During that entire time, her article stood with a very prominent notice saying it was going to be deleted, with a prominent link allowing people to argue in favor of keeping or, better yet, locate a real reliable source backing up any claim to her notability. Two weeks. Read the AfD. Read DGG's exegesis of the sources cited in this article --- the guy found out <i>how many libraries carried her book</i>.<p>Now, think about this: Jessie's article wasn't a marquee deletion event. Nobody gave a shit. It was just one of many pages up for AfD that week, alongside the founder of a political party nobody has ever heard of and 3 members of non-professional football clubs. <i>In every one of those retarded articles</i>, someone had to marshall real arguments, chase down real sources, and in many cases defend those arguments against both bona fide Wikipedia contributors and also sockpuppets of the subjects of the article. <i>Every time</i>.<p>Anyone who can snark that Wikipedia is a knee-jerk or arbitrary culture is betraying a deep ignorance of how the most successful Internet reference project in the history of the Internet actually works.<p>Something I don't get about people on HN and their attitude towards Wikipedia. None of you, not a one, expects Linus Torvalds to accept arbitrary contributions to the Linux kernel simply because that code could be disabled by default and wasn't going to bother anyone (unlike a bogus Wikipedia article, which taints the encyclopedia and also Google search results). People with experimental or long-shot Linux contributions (at least, people besides ESR) tend to set up Github pages instead of writing long-winded rants about the "deletionism" rampant in the world's most successful open source project. But Wikipedia kills an article about an SEO consultant, and you're up in arms.<p><i>Mostly, this comment I'm writing is just bitching</i>. So, to repay you the kindness of reading my own windbag rant, I offer you this gift: THE VERY FEW SIMPLE RULES OF THUMB YOU WILL EVER NEED TO AVOID FRUSTRATION OVER THE "Deletionism" OF WIKIPEDIA:<p><i>RULE NUMBER ONE: DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT YOURSELF, YOUR COMPANY, PROGRAMS THAT YOU WROTE, OR YOUR UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL.</i><p><i>RULE NUMBER TWO: IF YOU HAVE TO ASK, DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR FRIENDS' COMPANIES, PROGRAMS THAT YOUR FRIENDS WROTE, OR YOUR FRIENDS UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL.</i><p>They should just put those two rules on the edit box on the site, I agree; would make everyone's life easier.

While this is the typical story about online "cabals", this is also the story of how Wikipedia's alleged success as a platform - no meta-functionality, everything is accomplished through the Wiki itself - is also its failure.<p>MediaWiki is great software for collaboratively editing documents. It is lousy software for workflow management. All the Kafkaesque dead-ends he describes are wiki pages that try to use other wiki pages as a medium for controlling the process of creating wiki pages.

What Wikipedia really needs is for a UI expert to step in and fix what is essentially a broken UI.<p>Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops. Navigating a twisted web of broken or confusing or incorrect links with walls of text at every step does not a good UI make.<p>All of the UI frustrations the op experiences snowball into a frustrated response, which only aggravates and frustrates the editors who receive such responses. This, in turn, further snowballs things until everyone is aggravated, nobody wants to contribute, and Wikipedia stagnates.<p>So, fix Wikipedia's UI. It's in everyone's long term interests to do so.

From the action deletion discussion:<p>"The result was delete. As far as I can tell, the numbers are split about 7-6 in favour of delete. That's not normally going to lead to a consensus to delete unless there are unusual circumstances, such as one side having significantly stronger arguments than the other, so much as that can be ascertained objectively. In this case, the final three unchallenged delete !votes—DGG, ItsZippy and Metropolitan90—demonstrate such strength.<p>DGG and Metropolitan90 highlight a number of fundamental misconceptions behind a number of the keep !votes, such as the inaccuracy of the assertions that the subject's work was covered significantly in The Google story and that The Google story is a Pulitzer prize-winning book. DGG also demonstrates with clear evidence that the subject's own book is not as prominent as asserted, without any evidence, by some on the keep side. ItsZippy is the only editor in the debate, on either side, to comprehensively discuss the sources on offer as opposed to making generalised assertions about the sufficiency of the sourcing.<p>That those delete !votes have stood for between 7 and 13 days without any challenge leads me to conclude that there is a consensus to delete"<p>More here: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jessie_Stricchiola" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...</a>.<p>Two thoughts: yes, the back pages of Wikipedia are tricky to navigate for non-experts, it took me a while to find that link. No, Wikipedians are not all unfriendly deletionists.

I had similar experiences with Wikipedia. First time, I added some references and definitions related to a theoretical computer science concept and it was deleted for no reason.<p>Since then I stopped making edits unless something is incorrect.

A more extreme example is the Amanda Knox article on Wikipedia. For years it was kept deleted by a cabal of British English speaking administrators and editors (Knox's murdered roommate was British). A deletion review finally overturned the deletion a couple weeks after Knox's conviction was overturned.<p><a href="http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/03/amanda_knox_wikipedia_info_scr.php" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/03/amanda_kn...</a>

Perhaps nothing can be truly 'open' to contribution given that everybody has a different opinion and everybody often believes that they are right. Probably a huge number of newbies who tried posting something on Hacker News, will also feel that HN is closed and unfriendly as well. Is it really unfriendly or just a resource-management issue; it may be better not be perfect but can satisfy a large audience.

Slight tangent, but I can't understand why MediaWiki/Wikipedia is so resistant to a standard commenting/discussion system. Discussion pages are still just flat text anyone can edit.<p>I get the "simple is better" approach, but by now, there should be enough conventions, and there's certainly enough complexity, to warrant at least a basic structured forum.

It blows my mind that anything has to meet some arbitrary standard of notability in order to have a Wikipedia page. This is the Internet. Encyclopedia Britannica can't have a brief overview on every topic imaginable, because it's got to fit in a bound cover. The freedom to have information about absolutely every subject in existence seems to me the biggest benefit of putting an encyclopedia online, not the fact that "anyone can edit" Wikipedia - obviously, this is not true. Anyone can hypothetically write for Britannica, but only those that pass a certain muster actually do.

"<i>I’m a notable person on Wikipedia, as well as an expert in search marketing. So for what it’s worth, you’re seriously questioning whether Jessie should have her own page? That’s just crazy.<p>The page should be restored, and immediately. She’s clearly notable.</i>"<p>These lines make it clear enough what kind of clown we're dealing with.

The thrust of his arguement is that since he believes Jessica is more notable than he is, and wikipedia has an existing article about him then his opinion should count.<p>However, an alternative conclusion could be that he isn't notable by wikipedia's standards and his article should <i>also</i> be deleted.

I personally find Wikipedia semi-useful as an ultra-high level view of topics I want to refresh myself on or get interest in. I wouldn't cite it in any remotely academic or meaningful forum, but it's an amazingly broad repository of information.<p>I hold this view mainly because a great friend of mine, a college associate professor, got sick of students explicitly violating his directive to avoid Wikipedia as a primary source and started randomly changing entries.<p>His first (and in my mind best) work was when another friend who is very into music mentioned a jazz musician that he really liked. The professor friend said, "Oh yeah, he's the one that composed the background track to I Wanna Sex You Up". Then he rushed off to update that artist's wikipedia page to reflect that statement. My musically-inclined friend called back the next day and said, "Wow, I never would have guessed that!"<p>Is this a good thing? Absolutely not. However, seeing the unquestioned acceptance of Wikipedia content has opened my eyes to the way that the system can be gamed or used to support lies or propaganda. Because a musician was wronged? No, its the principle. I now take everything I read on wikipedia with a colossal grain of salt. You should too.

The bigger issue with Wikipedia is the bad UI and tons of bureaucracy that make everybody except hardcore users beware of editing.

Yeah, I've had similar experiences with Wikipedia. In the end I just gave up trying to contribute. Some user even has a bot that now chases me around when I make edits...

I can't agree with this post strongly enough. It's an amazing small insular community of bureaucracy.<p>I've tried to make a few minor edits and had my edits undone and squashed in a pretty unfriendly way, and encountered the same things that the author of this article did.<p>Bravo for calling it out and posting about it.

Looks like Danny's article on wikipedia has now come under scrutiny:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Sullivan_(technologist)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Sullivan_(technologist)</a><p>"The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. (November 2011)"<p>Personally, I think the notability guidelines are pretty outrageous and wildly out of date. I mean, how long before there aren't any "legitimate publications" by their standard?

I made this site awhile back, partly to address some of Wikipedia's conceptual peccadillos (notability, navigability, less than full openness). It didn't get traction, and I found it hard to market a knowledge-sharing site, in part because almost nobody is actively searching for knowledge-sharing solutions.<p>The core idea was a bidirectionally weighted graph where users could set the weightings using slider controls. I've since moved on to another project. Anyhoo, the site is mobwa.com. Sooner or later I'll get around to taking it down.

I love Wikipedia, both the idea behind it and the site it's self, and have contributed plenty of time and cash over the years. However I have to agree that the processes have become far too labyrinthine and unfriendly for the uninitiated.<p>We (the existing Wikipedia community) need to have a rethink of how we lay out our rules and guides and the process for navigating them, we also need to start being a smidge more consistent about how we enforce the rules.<p>Mostly though, we need to be a little more tolerant of the N00Bs. I get it's tricky, you're busy, hundred things at once and some muppet comes in asking the same question we've been asked 16million times before; it's easy to be a bit terse, but if we want Wikipedia to continue to succeed we need to take a deep breath in those moments and remember to that person, at that moment, we are Wikipedia. A bad impression that turns them away from the site means they're unlikely to ever come back and that's the last thing we want.<p>I get why everyone's being defensive, and yes, the article was written in a very combative style, but we also need to face up to it landing a few fair points, lets take those and get working on that instead of wasting time rowing about who's in the right.<p>How can we clarify the deletion process for someone looking from the outside in? How can we make it clearer who to contact in those sort of circumstances? Is there any way we can make talking to people easier?

"About two weeks ago, Jessie Stricchiola let me know that her Wikipedia page had been deleted. Apparently, she wasn’t notable enough."<p>Apparently, every fictional character from every forgotten TV show seems to merit their own page (see, for example, the amount of space that Wikipedia devotes to "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and its cast of characters). It's hard to imagine why any real person wouldn't be "notable enough" by these standards.

The reason why Wikipedia has these pages is because people push fringe science theories, jingoist distortions of history, and inflated product claims if you do not.<p>Even so, Wikipedia is effectively used to promote just these things. For example, the editor FT2 got promoted to ArbCom while underming efforts to eliminate pseudoscience. His philsophy he summed up "Writing for an encyclopedia is not the same as writing for an academic paper. It's more like writing the bibliography for an academic paper. We aren't trying to decide what is "true" and what isn't. To be honest, we don't care what "the truth" is, in that sense, because it's not what an encyclopedia is. An encyclopedia is a collation of multiple perspectives and views. It's more like the bibliography of a paper (listing all kinds of sources so long as they bear on the topic) than the paper and its conclusion itself. Every view of note is in there, represented neutrally. Theres no decision to make, few opinions to form, other than to observe which views seem to be more or less common views of note, and to understand each (and its sources) well enough to document. We care that we document each view fully and with understanding. That is the "truth" we work to here. "<p><a href="http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:The_Wikipedia_Point_of_View/Flavius_Vanillus#Dialogue_with_FT2" rel="nofollow">http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:The_Wikipedia_Point_of_Vi...</a><p>If making WP more unfriendly would combat this kind of anti-scientific bullshit, I would be in favour of it. I don't, though. A decent external infrastructure for criticising Wikiedpia articles and groups of articles might be more effective, which is why I have hopes for <a href="http://hypothes.is/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://hypothes.is/index.html</a>

If this guy had discovered the Internet in the early 90's I have confidence that he would have been single handedly responsible for inventing top posting.

I'm sorry about your case and the frustration that you had to face. However, they must be doing something right since Wikipedia has millions of user contributed pages? Also it might not be easy to administer a website of that size where anyone is free to go ahead and edit any of the hundreds of thousands of pages. Maybe they are settling for 99% satisfaction? That said, they do need our donations.

My experiences are identical. Their notion of community is tragic.

What most amuses me about all this is that it is the most famous Jessie Stricchiola has ever been.

I wonder if the same thing will happen to stackoverflow? They have a number of levels of access, reviewing, meta-reviewing, administrators, etc. What level do you get to before becoming a bureaucratic place where everything is designed and decided by comitee?

I would suggest Wikipedia needs a 'second page' site to host these types of 'less than notable pages' and they be eligible to be promoted to the main site.<p>But really I would just classify this as a #FirstWorldProblem

Don't get me started about the time I engaged in a revision war with the crazies over the Serial (Oxford) Comma. The Wikipedia page <i>still</i> has an "example" of where the Serial Comma "leads to ambiguity", but which is grammatically incorrect. All I was asking for was a single grammatically proper example to back up the extraordinary claim that the anti-serial-comma folks were making. They couldn't provide it but why does that matter when the revert button is so easy to press?

Can be summed up pretty easily:<p><a href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/butthurt" rel="nofollow">http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/butthurt</a>

Wikipedia is a clique. But, the author is kind of a "clueless as to how to work with strangers, esp voluntary strangers" idiot.<p>The key to getting your way (in anything) is to work the system. Learn it's idiosyncrasies, etc. Complaining that it doesn't work the way you want it to is fail.

Who's with me for providing a version of Wikipedia (there data is open right) that contains all pages that were ever deleted for notability reasons.<p>I fail to see how whether something is notable makes it more or less a fact that should be categorized.

It seems like one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia is the admin class. They often adopt this "us vs them" bunker mentality like one discovers with a few bad police apples. This especially true with new and unregistered users.

I'm unable to view the article; on Firefox, it never loads, and on Chrome, there are two scrollbars, but none of them actually scroll, so I can't get past the first page. Anyone care to provide a working copy?

<a href="http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853" rel="nofollow">http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853</a> doesn't work in Opera web browser.

A few years back, the list page for "gtd software" was deleted, the data was lifted, moved to a private web page, the "gtd" page was pointed at the latter as a reference! I (strongly) suspected the private company of arranging it via a wiki-fu but couldn't prove it. Perfect example of gaming the system.

First they came for "the woman who was the pioneer in fighting click fraud"<p>Then they came for me

bitter blogger is bitter.

Sounds like a lot of whining to me. The author's reaction to this made him lose all credibility with me.<p>First off, you think you're an expert? Maybe you are, maybe not but even experts aren't always right and just because <i>you</i> think in your infinite expert wisdom that so and so should have a Wikipedia page, the majority of us obviously don't.<p>Secondly, so sorry the appeals process was so inconvenient for you. So far Wikipedia is doing just fine and your rant doesn't seem to be hurting them much. With all the garbage that people attempt to post on Wikipedia, there's a good reason for all the walls.<p>In the end this comes off like a know-it-all's childish hissy fit for not getting his way. The world doesn't have to accept your point of view. Your response to this whole thing probably played a large role in you not getting what you wanted.<p>Next time try to up think about <i>why</i> some of these things are in place, know that you can't jump ahead of someone else in charge just because you think you're better qualified (it's first volunteer, first served on Wikipedia) and just approach the issue with a lot more tact and less childish kicking and screaming next time.<p>Some people love to talk about ideals like freedom, democracy, fairness, and all that but as soon as it inconveniences them they take the position that somehow those rules are for everyone else and they're somehow special. This guy doesn't fall in with the ideals thing I was talking about but he somehow managed to convince himself that everyone should just see thing <i>his</i> way.<p>How dare a free, worldwide, not for profit, website with a 99% democratic submission and editing process not bend to your will! The audacity!<p>Welcome to Wikipedia on the WWW where majority rules (even if you think they're all stupid-heads). I hope Jimmy Wales sends you a personal apology. Now let's all go edit the Wikipedia pages for "Cry Baby", "Brat", and "Temper Tantrum" and cite the author as a living example.

I changed 'tyre' to 'tire' in an article and got a vandalism notice on my talk page. That's when I stopped contributing.

From <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction</a><p>&#62; Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who use it.<p>There's the problem. Wikipedia should stop being an encyclopedia and start being Wikipedia.

Someone at Wikipedia recently requested speedy deletion for the article on Ilya Zhitomirskiy, two days AFTER he died. The vote was to keep:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...</a><p>I was an early user and editor of Wikipedia. I greatly dislike cliquishness and clannishness so I didn't last. The above treatment of a dead young coder only solidifies my decision to cease my association with the place.

The Wikipedia's definition of "notable" is a heap of crap. Maybe somebody should donate Jimmy a dictionary, besides the cash he's looking for.

Reading a lot of these and previous comments on HN, it seems:<p>Steve Jobs, harsh policies, shiny product: Good!<p>Jim Wales, harsh policies, shiny product: Bad!

... and they want $20 million for our work that they don't want. poor Wikipedia