Not to be the last one to talk about it but it’s hard not to say something about a struggle that has been going on for the past 14 months. When I first caught wind of this with the deletion of Outer Circle I was a little surprised at just how many web comics were being marked for deletion. Perhaps the biggest honor was Steve using his being reviewed by our little podcast as one of the reasons the strip was notable enough not to be deleted. The topic was annoying but interesting enough that I felt compelled to participate as a victim myself.
I went to Wikipedia and created an entry for Digital Strips. It was a modest little thing coming in at 2-4 sentences, just enough to say exactly what the site and podcast were about. I was happy with it and soon it was even popping up when I searched on Google for “digital strips” and there’s nothing more exciting to my modest ego then to see the site pop up in more places. The point of the experiment was to see what reason these “moderators” would use to delete the entry. Well for awhile the experiment was actually going badly. Those couple sentences sat there for months lasting through Zampzon leaving, adding more writers, and the addition of Phil. So much change occurred that I updated the entry to an eye-popping 3 paragraphs. Boy was I excited.
Here's the interesting part. By far the excuse used for removing web comics was because the entry was not notable. I was always seeing these death squads saying that this script only had 1000 hits on Google or ranked more then 1,000,000 on Alexa. Well I'm happy to report none of those apply to DS. Using the same search mentioned above DS got a little over 54k hits, albeit a small percentage of those are for converting video or chemistry. On Alexa we were hovering around the 150k mark at he beginning of the year. You'll never guess what happened, actually you pobably knew before I finished the first paragraph. Because we were notable we instead were deleted because only one other person had corrected/added material to the entry other then the creator.
The entry was deleted because I have good grammar and like to get my facts straight and complete. Can you believe that? The answer is yes but I was so jaded I stopped caring about Wikipedia altogether. It looks like these moderators are doing a fantastic job of killing their readership.
Oh, Wiki, how I love you.
If you ever want to frighten yourself about the state of the human race, read the deletion threads on Wiki. I was scanning through the arguments wether or not to delete Joe Loves Crappy Movies (so days it scares me what I’ll do with my time). The battle lines were drawn as they usually are. Basically it came down to name calling and an argument of wether or not they liked the strip. Parr for the course, I’m afraid.
One kid said it should remain on the site because he liked to go to JLCM because he found it a helpful and useful site.
On of the moderators shot this down argument saying something along the lines of “Usefulness isn’t a consideration for Wikipedia.”
WTF?
I learned this the hard way. I tried starting my own Norm & Cory article and it got deleted by that person who always says things like “notable, Neilson rating,” and quotes lots of percentages. I now hate Wiki for treating comics like this. They can have an article about farting, but not webcomics!