This. Relatedly, losing an easy Google News Archive was killer for some of the research I'd like to do. Several papers/articles I wrote in c. 2010 would not be possible to do today.
Thanks for this! I'm talking about old scanned newspapers. :-) The Internet Archive has a good start, but it's pretty heavy on Kentucky, and few have in-text search available, which is killer if you're researching an event with few/no specific dates. (That's not to knock them—IA is pretty amazing, and OCRing newspapers is notoriously difficult.)
It's still /technically/ possible to search what's there via https://news.google.com/newspapers. Still, it's not exactly user-intuitive, and not being able to sort/search by date can make historical research very difficult (especially when the OCR isn't perfect—that's common, but trying several different phrases to make sure you've found everything is way easier when searching range of years).
Online newspaper archives are a ridiculously awesome boon for the humanities. Chronicling America from the Library of Congress, for instance, is great. It's the de facto successor to Google News Archive in the US. I just wish that Google News Archive could get a couple of the old search features back to aid researchers. :-)
Second, on a quick tangent I just discovered: when you select "archives" at news.google.com, it says "looking for scanned newspapers?" with a link to: https://support.google.com/news/answer/3334. But there's nothing there anymore about scanned news. :-)
Wikipedia admin here. Re your question, that's because you've accused the wrong editor.[1] :-)
Looking at the article at the time it was nominated,[2] there isn't much of an explicit claim to being notable under Wikipedia's policies.[3] However, it was nominated for speedy deletion all of seven minutes after you created it—pretty quick, something I never like to see for articles that fall into a grey area.
Perhaps I have remembered incorrectly. I am far out of my depth of knowledge, so I defer to your information. Also please excuse my conflation of notability and "noteworthiness". As you can see and I think we can understand, as my first entry, I didn't know exactly how and what to do.
In spite of this, I have this distinct memory of AC being a problem, I will look through my change log (Tlow03) and see if perhaps the article was moved or renamed from my original attempt.
Also thank you for this clarification and you're right I think it probably was a grey area, but I do think the compound in question is a novel hand sanitizer that is the only of it's kind I know of.
DISCLAIMER: I have no affiliation with the company at this time, a friend once worked there, but I do not and never have had any financial interest.
Update: Yes the "boom your contribution is gone and doesn't belong here" almost the moment you write it feels very hostile.
That post didn't look particularly noteworthy to me, but I remember creating a similar page regarding a casual wear company (called "Lost..." if I recall) that I got distracted with one time. I saw their logos in my local mall in every department store. I spent a lot of time researching and writing up an article on the company. Then it got deleted. Probably not particularly noteworthy either, even if at one time it was a national brand.
I also wrote up a thorough discussion of various kinds of permanent life insurance contracts (I was a financial advisor at the time, and I had spent a lot of time studying them, and wanted others to have that information). I think the bulk of my contribution managed to get redacted at some point, but it lives on in the version control, forever.
There's a lot of stakeholders to Wikipedia: the subjects of articles and their followers, hawkish community members who try to control new and changed content, and consultants who charge money to change the framing of subjects on the site.
As a result, pages tend to be flattering of their subjects, unless the subjects don't have a lot of followers who speak the language that the page is written in. And new pages are likely to be deleted unless you have the cooperation of community members who will advocate for it when you start focusing on something else.
Now I mostly write up Python on Stack Overflow, where I get credit for my answers in terms of valuable internet points, which reflects my reputation in the community.
Perhaps Wikipedia could learn something from Stack Overflow. But unfortunately, it looks like they have incentivized deleting content and creating value for subjects over creating value for readers.
The parent response exhibits, politely, typical problems I've experienced with Wikipedia editing. It debates details, policies (with citations), customs, but does not address the actual problem (in this case, the hassles of contributing) or help advance the core mission, which is the content.
My experiences are similar to the GP, and often the responses aren't nearly as polite as the parent. It's just not worth the time to contribute.
You are absolutely right and I'm surprised more people are not calling that person out for what you describe. The person even notes that the article was nominated for speedy deletion __seven minutes__ after it was created. That is insane!
Very much reminds me of the time Around 2008 when Jimmy Wales' article about an SA restaurant was deleted for similar reasons[1]. Looks like for all its discussion the Wiki community has learned nothing.
that's entirely the problem being discussed here: there's a lot of things that shouldn't get deleted that nevertheless do, because there's a large number of wikipedia editors who feel a sense of accomplishment from deleting things.
Historically, that's not much protection for a short article. The Deletionists largely won the war, and plenty of acceptably-notable articles get tagged with "en-encyclopedic" or other bases.
This is like saying "well, our side lost 90,000 out of our 100,000 soldiers, but the fact that you can still find 10,000 soldiers on our side means the enemy didn't win!"
Depending on the objectives of the military engagement in question, the casualty count is not necessarily the determining factor when it comes to who "won" said engagement.
The point is: your article can get nuked at any moment unless your article is about a topic familiar to the Wiki Admin demographic OR unless it has a defender (a powerful enough Wiki Admin who will monitor and stand up for the article).
That gives me an idea. Wiki Admins should offer a paid service! Pay me monthly and I'll actively protect article(s) of your choosing from deletion or vandalism!
Yep, you captured the point I was going for here. It's not that all stubs and oddities are deleted, it's that if an article catches someone's eye the default decision is "delete".
That's almost worse, since the results are so haphazard. Outside of a few predictable topics (virtually all cities/towns get long-lasting stubs), Wikipedia is "comprehensive" only to the limits of "no one noticed, or someone powerful stepped up to defend it".
And yet this probably only happened because it was getting coverage.
I did my time as a Wikipedia editor. I've watched others do it, too. It's exhausting. You end up obsessively checking your watchlist multiple times a day, then every hour, then multiple times per hour, because you never know when someone will get you in their sights. And then you have to be prepared to obsessively watch talk pages and project pages and noticeboards 24/7 to be ready to come back in and copy/paste sources and arguments and the appropriate WP:IMEMORIZEDWIKISPEAK links over and over and over again to try to defend something. And even then you probably won't succeed.
Wikipedia is eating itself and is smugly proud of it. The effort involved in creating and preserving a piece of worthwhile content is orders of magnitude higher than the effort involved in deleting it, and people who get stuff deleted also get rewarded for doing so, while people who create and maintain get comparatively very little recognition. Eventually Wikipedia will have only two articles, someone will propose merging them, and them someone else will speedy-delete the last one for breaking various rules. And that'll be the end of it.
oh I suspected something like that but it left me wondering why would the copyrighted material stay there and the records of the edits disappear - shouldn't it be the other way around? I've also read about RevDel and that leaves the record in place just hides the summary/user/text of edit but leaves the record in history.
You're exactly right on RevDel (revision deletion). However, in this case only certain edits were restored after the article was deleted—but the copyright violations were left deleted, so there was no record of them in the public edit history.
That's why I've just restored the edits and revision-deleted the (copyrighted) text, leaving the editor and edit summaries public!
