User:Haikupoet/Wehatetech trainwreck

There is NSFW language used here. Just warning you.

The following is my personal opinion and hopefully my final statement on the subject. I've heard enough from all sides that I don't particularly feel like fielding comments about the matter, so please don't leave them on this page, and I'd prefer that you didn't put them on my talk page either. Any comments left on this page will be deleted. Not moved, deleted.

It is often said: "Never piss off a Perl geek with a cause". I'm not sure what to say to that, except to assume that whoever came up with that was of the opinion that Perl geeks were, to a one, batshit insane motherfuckers. I wonder if the same thing isn't true about sysadmins -- after all, a lot of them are Perl geeks too...

So as a sometime contributor to Articles for deletion, I posted my opinion on an article for a website I'd never heard of, wehatetech.com. They claim, and I have no reason to doubt, that they are a website for sysadmins who are tired of cleaning up technical bloopers, miscues, and other assorted disasters. There's a long and hallowed tradition of such things, the most primal of all of them being scary devil monastery on Usenet. Now WHT has a podcast, something which since the invention of the term a year or so ago has become a dime a dozen, and I voted delete, nonnotable. Others did as well, for much the same reason. The article was deleted, despite a fair amount of noise from two of its supporters who seemed to be Wikipedia newbies. Thus began a horrifying trainwreck of a debate/guerrilla war that seemed to ultimately center around me and User:Zoe, an admin who I don't know and never had any occasion to contact until recently.

Words were exchanged. I admit to occasionally being uncivil, but the upshot was that I was trying to get across to the WHTers that a consensus had been formed that wehatetech.com was not notable enough for an article -- that not enough people were likely to want to look it up in Wikipedia. You often see people debating a judgement of nonnotability on the AfD for their pet article, but in about a year of contributing to Wikipedia I've never seen a group of people so persistent about trying to get their group "recognized" (for whatever good that would do) on Wikipedia.

There have been accusations of censorship and collusion. There have been threats to drag the flamewar (as that's all it really is at this point, the AfD long since having been closed) out far beyond reason. Above all there has been a pattern of obtuseness about the nature and function of Wikipedia and its culture from the WHTers, which I find especially ironic coming from a group that claims to be made up primarily of sysadmins, a group of people well known for their intense desire to force every user to RTFM twice over before calling for help. (I've done tech support, I've been there, I understand.)

The following I do not say to pull rank, but simply to give an illustration. I first got internet access in February of 1994, a few months after the September That Never Ended, and was heavily involved in Usenet for a number of years. The bitterness at the incoming flood of dotcom newbies was palpable and the Serdar Argic spam affair was at the high water mark. The cardinal rule of Usenet, something that was drummed into newbies on a regular basis back then: when you go into a forum, you lurk for a while, read the FAQs, just generally learn the lay of the land before you post. Not only does Wikipedia recommend that, but when it comes to AfD it's enshrined in policy -- newbies have to make a really good point in order to get recognized on AfD, and those who come in just to stuff the ballot box are often ignored. I believe this is a good system. The problem is when you get legions of meatpuppets (most of whom probably wouldn't even understand the term as Wikipedians use it, much less realize that they are) coming in to affect an AfD without knowing how things work here, things sometimes get uncivil.

This is what happened here, in spades. There has been a great deal of guilt tripping and rules lawyering in attempts to get the article decision reversed, and in the process the WHT advocates have run roughshod over the process, to remarkably little end. The admins on the WHT website have declared a unilateral truce, which is fine with me as I'm quite sick of the whole mess, but have said that if others want to continue they can, which is not fine.

I have no hope that those remaining in the fight will back off without admin intervention. They seem so determined to make their point that they aren't willing to take anything anyone on the WP side says at face value unless it backs up their predetermined POV. I'm going to walk away now and chalk this up as a lesson in just how nasty the AfD process can get.

BTW, don't post on this page. That's what talk pages are for.