gzipped_tar's Journal: WP:OR

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/29/1814222

Comments to the story linked above reminded me of this anecdote. I was writing up an WP article on a certain software library.

You know, there's a template specially designed for software products, where you can put info into text fields such as name, language, platform, version and release date, etc. To make sure it meets the standard of Wikipedia as closely as possible, I carefully organized my reference list before I set out to write it. I tried to make the list comprehensive: even facts like release date needed its citation.

However, the exact release date was only available in the comments in the source. The author's release-notes were not dated (horror). As I was not sure which template to use for citing source code, I pushed a question to the help desk. I asked it simply because which one was the best for *formatting* source code citation. I was pretty sure it would be OK citing source code. I've seen many books on computing doing that, and there are also published academic papers citing source code.

To my surprise, the first respond was something like this: "You don't do that. It's OR." Until then did I realize the real-life omnipresence of deletionism out there. I used to think it is a fictitious entity used to scare small children.

OK, I was not even trying to research anything. All I needed was to tell the reader "Package foo, version bar was released on XXX. Everybody knows it was *indeed* released on XXX because the author, who is after all sure about his own product, made it public in the source code in path/to/filename.c." Does that count as OR?

After all, I just ignored that opinion altogether. If anyone feels like taking down the article, be bold (WP:BOLD) and do it. Anyway, it's a small and "low traffic" article not notable enough to touch our deletionist overlords' egos. (And I think the whole "notability" stuff is a joke. Only the articles notable enough are caught by the trolls to be pushed to the deletion line.)

A note to deletionism zealots: look at WP:HORSE. Please don't mindlessly slap the OR tag on other's writings. If it *is not* OR and you *call* it OR, it is still not.

Disclaimer: I'm not attacking the Wikipedian who gave me the OR answer on the help desk. I'm not irritated by that comment, but by the various editor wars on other articles.

Posted in Journal because this is off-topic.