As you might know, a couple of days ago I wrote an odd Fudzilla related news bit. In the meantime, all hell broke loose and our entry on Wikipedia was beginnig to look more like the British Constitution than an article. A few sentences followed by centuries of fruitless discussions and a neverending arguement between two unreconsilable factions. Even Guy Fawkes couldn't sort this one out.Well, it seems like some overzealous people with nothing better to do would just love to see us hung, drawn and quartered, so they killed us off.
But then my curiosity kicked in, so I took a look at Wikipedia tech stuff. I found out out that in the past weeks some members were also nominating Tomshardware and Anandtech for deletion. Imagine the irony, a bunch of people trying to kick out respected online publications form Wikipedia based on the pretext that they're "just online publications" and as such not notable. And what the heck is Wikipedia, carved in stone like the Ten commandments or something ?
They also accuse these sites of using the online encyclopedia for marketing. For example, some of them claimed Fudzilla was somehow using the entry for advertising purposes, as the Wiki article came in second when you google "Fudzilla".
Wait a minute. That wasn't our article, we didn't put it there, we didn't edit it and we sure as hell didn't join the recent deletion discussions. Not to mention it was also used to bash Fudzilla. So, as a matter of fact, Wikipedia was using Fudzilla to get more visitors all along, and not the other way around. After all, it was their site that supposedly came up second in the results, not ours.
On another note, the good folk of the Inq were more than happy to seize the opportunity and exact revenge for their fallen Everywhere Girl. Inq's Nick Farrell writes: "An encyclopedia written by the people is all very well so long as the people aren't a lynch mob grinding axes." Check it out here, if you haven't already.
Also, a Wikipedian admin accused me of: "Canvassing on the site itself (which) leads me to believe we may get a lot of "support" appearing out of nowhere." He signed his post with a warning, "Caveat administrator". Well, time to remember what I can from my law school Latin lessons: "Errare humanum est, in errore perservare stultum."
Anyway, good riddens to that horrible article.
At press time we learned that Inquirer's Nick Farell took action to defend the Everywhere's girl, Mike Magee and Fudzilla and started to talk to legal parts of Wikipedia. This story certainly hasn't reached its end.