There’s a little storm brewing over here in Australia/NZ edublogging land, and its over the often contraversial wikipedia deletion policy. Sean FitzGerald makes a valid point:

Does anyone else see the contradiction here? The irony even? Wikipedia – the poster child of user-generated content, citizen journalism and the wisdom of the masses says that extensive reference to a topic on blogs, forums, chat rooms and wikis does not constitute notability.

If that is true… then what the policy is saying is that Wikipedia itself is not a reliable source!

The issue in question is the hastey deletion of a new and helpful entry for Zeitgeist the movie. If you look into what remains of the discussion relating to the deletion you will find a rather concerning point – that the page (and all its history and discussion) was deleted within 3 minutes of the creator (Squarepush3r – no details) asking for a hold on the action!! The tagger for deletion (Matticus78) argues that the hold should have had a discussion post relating to the reasoning for the hold, the creator argues that 3 minutes was not enough to create that reasoning post. The deletion was done by Stephen – no further details.

I find it quite disturbing. Not helped by the fact that I think the movie is significant – if only for its value in agitprop. But also because the transparency of the deletion process is not all that clear, in that the original page is gone and blocked from starting again! along with any chance to discuss its significance or to review the deletion process…

PS. I forgot to add the link to GodlessLibralHomo’s pretty thorough overview of the issue.

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