Should I feel discouraged?

I have long been a fan of Wikipedia. It’s the first place I go for information about things high tech. I consult Wikipedia for biographical information about innovators, explanations of concepts I don’t understand, and, especially, to learn how people are using new Web terminology and slang.

So it was to Wikipedia that I turned a few weeks ago when I came across the term “disemvowel.” I was interested in the practice of disemvoweling as a tactic for blog owners and moderators to discourage trolls, and I’d noted the existence of a few plugins for disemvoweling text (including one for WordPress).

Wikipedia did not let me down; I found an article about disemvoweling that told me what I needed to know. But to my surprise, existence of this article was threatened: a message at the top informed me that it was “nominated for deletion.”

For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why someone would want to delete a seemingly harmless page of information about an emerging web practice. If it couldn’t be explained in Wikipedia, then where would one go to for information about “disemvoweling”? Not the Oxford English Dictionary or Britannica, I’d bet.

So despite my effort to control my clicking finger, I found myself navigating over to the deletion discussion.

What I learned surprised me. Whatever the merits of the term disemvowel, or the Wikipedia article about it, the discussion seemed to be mainly about one individual’s personal dislike of the article’s original author. The rest of the opposition focused on the point that since “disemvoweling” comes from the universe of blogs, it may not be worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia. One person argued that blogs are “vanity presses”[*] and therefore cannot be a reliable authority for a Wikipedia article. Others maintained that the term itself is being bandied about in a very limited sphere — the blogosphere — and does not warrant Wikipedia’s attention.

I found much of the discussion diametrically opposed to my impression of what Wikipedia is. And I was surprised to find scorn for bloggers from a community that interacts in a way that’s strikingly similar to the publish/comment/response interactions one finds in the blogosphere.

(An aside: One vocal contributor to the deletion discussion commented a few times that all those voting in favor of the article were actually friends and fans of the article’s original author, Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I wish to record here that I had never heard of Teresa Nielsen Hayden before reading this Wikipedia entry, and I have never read her blog.)

Could it be that the Wikipedia community is not as open and welcoming as I had thought? I consulted the rules about deleting articles. Here’s what they say:

Anyone except blocked users is welcome to participate in nominating articles for deletion or discussion of existing nominations. Participants in the deletion process should read (and be familiar with) the core Wikipedia policies of Verifiability, No Original Research and Neutral Point of View first, since deletion is based upon policy and not personal likes and dislikes.
Wikipedia Deletion Policy

This I found heartening; I could participate and vote. I read the policies and registered my “Keep” vote — and my disappointment over the tone of the discussion — on the deletion discussion page. Here’s what I wrote:

Keep: As a technical writer in the software industry, I use Wikipedia as a source for definitions and explanations of Internet jargon. I expect to find new terms in Wikipedia, and came to Wikipedia for information about “disemvoweling.” I was surprised (and disappointed) to find that the article is being considered for deletion primarily, it seems, because someone doesn’t like the author.

For the next couple of days, I checked back to see if and how the matter had been resolved. But the discussion went on and on, and I began checking less frequently.

Then a New Yorker article about Wikipedia, written by Stacy Schiff, reminded me about the disemvoweling discussion. One of the points Schiff makes is that the percentage of the Wikipedia website’s content devoted to actual articles is dropping, and the percentage devoted to discussion and arguments about content and governance is increasing. Disemvoweling is a case in point — while the article is barely a page and a half in length, the discussion of its merits is (as of this writing) 80 pages and still growing.

After reading the New Yorker article I returned to Wikipedia to see if the entry for disemvoweling had finally been blessed or banned. The entry is still there, though it has been rewritten. The deletion discussion has been deemed to have yielded “no consensus.” Wondering how that judgment had been reached, I took another look at the deletion discussion. I scrolled down to read the comments and votes recorded after I’d added my two cents. And there, attached to my “Keep” vote, was this:

Comment: Users fifth edit, only one since July 13. -Royalguard11Talk 00:51, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I’m not sure how to interpret this. Is Royalguard11 suggesting that since I’ve made only five contributions to Wikipedia, my vote doesn’t count? Royalguard11 seems to be an experienced Wikipedian, so perhaps he or she knows better than I. At any rate, the comment, and the entire deletion discussion, definitely discourages me from participating.

Should I feel disillusioned? Or just discouraged?

[*] Interestingly, in her New Yorker article about Wikipedia, Stacy Schiff writes, “Wikipedia may be the world’s most ambitious vanity press.” (Annuals of Information, “Know It All,” The New Yorker, July 31, 2006)