The internet, like space, is pretty much endless to the limited imagination of the humble human.
The great random beast of subjective knowledge, Wikipedia, appears too to have an opinion on pretty much everything, even if, like the fickle humans it serves, it changes its opinions from time to time, or becomes an expert in some field in which it was once a mere amateurish hack. But you would be wrong to think this – much like the on-line encyclopaedia is often accused of being.
For there's plenty of reasons and examples for material not making the site.
Rise of the eternal archivers
In his article for ars technica Nate Anderson says: "Plenty of user-generated content simply isn't very good, or doesn't fall within established parameters, or violates copyright, or does something else that gets it yanked from the sites that host such material, but sites like Deletionpedia and Delutube have sprung up to archive the deletions."
And Deletionpedia is a 60,000 strong archive of material not considered good enough for Wikipedia.
In his article, Anderson gives examples of some of the subjects nearly deleted from the world's data banks. Weapons of the Imperium, for instance, a vast listing of the arsenal available to inhabitants of a computer game, was taken down from Wikipedia after a mere two and a half years.
It was resurrected by the faithful for Deletionpedia as was a list of bounty hunters from Star Wars. In the last week, Deletionpedia was itself close to being axed, in an twist that was almost lost to irony lovers forever.
Following the recent Wiki report on Vernon Kay being effectively 'un-dead', TechRadar editor (news) Patrick Goss warned of the folly of taking Wiki's relatively uncollaborated word on anything without checking elsewhere too.
But then he would say that: he's still waiting for his profile to be posted up. Give it a week. And then check elsewhere.
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