Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Slashdot trolling phenomena

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Delete - those expressing keep opinions have not sufficiently addressed the reasons for the nomination to allow this to be kept. Yomanganitalk 00:41, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Slashdot trolling phenomena

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Nomination for deletion Full of original research with poor sourcing (seems to be using slashdot posts and spinoff slashdot troll sites only). The article does not show how the "Slashdot trolling phenomena" (such as "crapflooding" (I'm sure far more of this happens on wikipedia than slashdot), anti-semitism, homophobia, racism, plagiarism, flamewars, "karma whores" (many web forums/communities have a comment scoring system)) described here are substantively unique and distinct from trolling phenomena elsewhere. Claim that Slashdot has particularly "bizarre and complex" subculture is ungrounded (and incidentally compared to what? Scientology? Birdwatching?) Memes described are ephemeral in content and unsourced ("Hot grits", "Stephen King is dead"). There is no claim for encyclopedic notability here.

NOTE: Please see previous vfd:

Also see related afds:

Bwithh 18:54, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

  • Strong delete Probably the worst of the 3 Slashdot culture articles, although the "subculture" one is close. Loads of external links to various slashdot posts, absolutely zero reliable sources even though the article has been around for years. For what it's worth, while I'm sure Slashdot does get trolls just like any forum does, the moderation system is set to hide trolling by default, so the vast majority of readers never even see such posts. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 19:15, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
Actually, most good trolls get moderated up, not down, because the moderators don't realize they're trolls. It's crapfloods that get moderated down, not real trolling. When Trollback was running, many of the best-crafted trolls were at +5. 4.253.43.8 17:30, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Not even forks - I think they're automatically generated mirrors of wikipedia Bwithh 13:30, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Delete Sorry guys, but Slashdot isn't as important as you think. Danny Lilithborne 01:55, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Redirect to Slashdot#Trolling. —Quarl (talk) 2006-10-08 02:27Z
  • Delete. Don't redirect to Slashdot#Trolling as redirects to sections doesn't always work. Interesting work here but it's clearly WP:OR. Mangojuicetalk 05:54, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Delete It's all original research and there aren't any reliable sources that could be added. GassyGuy 08:25, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete per nom and Andrew Lenahan; original research and a large helping of vanicruft is not what makes encyclopedic content. Angus McLellan (Talk) 11:37, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment This article was already listed on AFD. It received nearly unanimous Keep votes, roughly in the range of 95% with extremely high voter turnout. Please consider this precedent and the fact that the Wikipedia community considered it poor form to list articles on AFD multiple times. Furthermore, if a person does insist on skirting this guideline by re-AFDing an article that had a strong Keep consensus, it's expected that he will at least link to the previous AFD so it doesn't appear he's trying to sneakily cover up the previous AFD. 4.253.43.8 17:27, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
    • 1) I did check through the talk page (too hastily) and did not see the previous VfD (the general practice now is to highlight these in a colour shaded box - I was looking for one of those; also the link to the afd nomination screen from the afd tag led to a blank screen rather than the first AfD, so this also led me to assume there were no previous ones.). My bad. 2) Please see WP:CCC - which is an actual official policy as opposed to the made-up "guideline that I'm skirting" which you suggest is implied by the GNAA talk page (I disagree than such notion is implied, and certainly not as a guideline). Please also see WP:AGF. Also, I don't consider a second nomination "multiple times" (I also think GNAA (which has been nominated 18 times or something) should continue to be open to afds). It's also been more than 2 years since the vfd, so its not like we haven't given the article time to improve or people haven't been adding to the article (there's actually been a few hundred edits since then). And I'd like to think that in those 2+ years, Wikipedia's standards and expectations have gone up a bit. Bwithh 19:00, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Not notably different from trolling anywhere else. Delete -- The Anome 20:41, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete or Merge with the subculture main article. --- RockMFR 20:44, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep. I haven't even been on Slashdot for very long and these folks are very well known. It'd be a mistake to delete it outright; at least merge into Slashdot trolling phenomona. Chayama 01:44, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep Strong keep. This is very useful resource for old memes, so one can dig them up and reuse them, or modify them. Any one who has been involved in slashdot subculture will appreciate this article, and any one new to the trolling scene who wishes to learn about the history of some of these will find this article most useful. And also as wikipedia is a online project, having articles on

internet subcultures seems most apt. If the eventual is to delete, then this would have to be preserved as a section in the slashdot main article because the content is worth keeping. Alexs 11:03, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

"This is very useful resource for old memes, so one can dig them up and reuse them, or modify them." So... you're saying this article should be kept because its helpful to people who want to troll on Slashdot? I don't think this is what Wikipedia is for. Encyclopedia Dramatica is probably the more suitable site. Bwithh 12:55, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment, I think this article in within the spirit and nature of Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not.

    Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia. This means that there is no practical limit to the number of topics we can cover other than verifiability and the other points presented on this page.

    and

    Wikipedia articles should not exist only to describe the nature, appearance or services a website offers, but should describe the site in an encyclopedic manner, offering detail on a website's achievements, impact or historical significance, which can be significantly more up-to-date than most reference sources since we can incorporate new developments and facts as they are made known.

    -68.81.100.139 07:14, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
    • I think the points you're citing are actually grounds that people are voting for delete on Bwithh 10:30, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete... I'm a bit surprised it survived this long... This is basically one big piece of original research about trolling behaviors on one website. Maybe Dramatica would accept this, but other than a brief mention at the Slashdot article, I don't see how this in any way is encyclopedic material, and I'm a longtime /. reader.--Isotope23 16:32, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete Part OR, part of stuff not particularly limited to Slashdot. Yeah, it's old, but it started the march with the wrong foot, so to speak. --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 15:28, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep I think it is worth keeping, just because the article lacks citiation does not make it invalid. It just needs cleanup, not deletion. Janizary 16:21, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
    • Comment actually, yes it does. Cleaning up the unverified parts would leave a blank article here.--Isotope23 17:29, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
    • If there aren't any sources for the article, that is a cleanup issue. If there aren't any sources available for the article (because none exist), that is a deletion issue. Recury 17:34, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep I have to come clean why I feel we should keep this article: plain and simple, its just a fun and fascinating read. Honestly, this kind of article is a great example of why I love wikipedia - we don't mind a page of subculture munitiae. As more and more of our lives and interactions move online, the history and culture of our experiences become depressingly ephemeral and temporary. I ran into this recently with an obscure opensource game I've played for a few years (MAngband) - I decided it was time for an article about it (its been around for coming up on a decade) and was saddened to find that old archives of the early-days-development mailing lists had eventually been deleted and the site they were on closed. Is it obscure? Yes. Does the Greater Populace really care? Nope. But it was and is a small but persisting phenomena that has had an impact on a small, quite group. How sad it would be to think that so many of these things, on a larger scale, suddenly vanish from all lasting knowledge with the click of a mouse button at a webhost. Is the article clunky and messy? Then let's commit to cleaning it up! The quirky, funny, and oddly interesting subculture that arose in a community of hundreds of thousands of people is certainly worth keeping with us. Dxco 03:09, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
This is kind of depressing to me. It's like the signal of the end of real life in place of Internet culture; however, as that hasn't happened, this article remains not part of our history, but rather the history of a small minority, and as such needn't be covered in an encyclopaedia. GassyGuy 07:39, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
1) Wikipedia's primary purpose is to become an authoritative encyclopedia, not a free archive space for your favourite internet forum. Articles like this which make multiple claims that are not proven or verifiable (these kinds of trolling are specially associated with Slashdot, and this is an encyclopedically notable phenomenon) are detrimental to Wikipedia's purpose and are out of line with official guidelines and policies. WP:ILIKEIT is not a good reason to keep 2) this article has been around for 4 years (2 years since its first vfd). The article has had plenty of time and plenty of edit to become sufficiently encyclopedic. It hasn't. Bwithh 12:27, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Keep The article is well-written. I found the information very intriguing reading through, and I post there once in a blue moon. Slashdot is important; there's a reason it's so notorious for running sites out of bandwidth. Twin Bird 03:21, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
We already have articles on Slashdot and the Slashdot effect. The article is not well-written in terms of Wikipedia standards as an encyclopedia which excludes original research and requires verifiable sources of an article's encyclopedic claims. Bwithh 17:04, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Keep Per above. If you think it's badly written, improve it!--Planetary 04:02, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
The main issue is not that it's badly written but that its claims are based on unverifiable original research and are unencyclopedic in nature. It's been around for 4 years with plenty of editing but no signs of improvement. Bwithh 12:27, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep, as also per above (Dxco's comments). JoeSmack Talk(p-review!) 06:34, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Keepish, pare it down to what is verifyable, notable and distinct. If there is nothing that remains, then that is what will happen. But it can be edited down to what we need; and what is encyclopaedic. (btw, reading it was informative, I cannot make a personal evaluation on how distinct slashdot is from the rest of the internet, but it did seem there was some slashdot-specific info therein) Just get the information that is regurgitation from other trolling articles out. -- Cimon Avaro; on a pogostick. 07:29, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm afraid this is what would happen if you cut out the parts that couldn't be sourced and the parts that weren't unique to Slashdot: "Trolling occurs on Slashdot." Not much of an article. GassyGuy 07:40, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment, The claims that this material is unverifiable is unfounded. The majority of this information can be found on Slashdot itself within its archive of comments. Also the majority of this information is common knowledge within the Slashdot community. 68.81.100.139 10:02, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Fark has a similar list of "Farkisms" which the majority are not cited from a "reputable" source. I think if the topic is the culture of a specific Internet community, the citing of specific examples from the site itself should be enough to warrant verifiability. 68.81.100.139 10:18, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Whoa, I just looked at that Fark article. Cruft-tastic. I am not familiar with Fark.com at all (had to read the article to see what it was...) but I hope you or someone else better able to judge will go through and weed out the original research and needless crap. However, I feel that cleaning up that article is a better solution than just letting all Internet communities have unsubstantiated minutia documented. GassyGuy 15:41, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Yes, you can go to Slashdot and see that people are trolling this way. But here's the thing: Slashdot postings are basically unrelated instances of random happenstances. They don't necessarily interrelate with the bigger picture. Anyone could post a couple of postings there over a time, come here, and claim it's a "minor trolling phenomenon". Thus, we can't really use Slashdot itself because correlation doesn't mean causality: To determine whether the trolling phenomenon is notable and specific to Slashdot, we'd need to draw educated, weighted conclusions based on a lot of Slashdot comments, which is original research. In Wikipedia we don't draw educated, assertive conclusions, just simple deductive conclusions based on already published research. You could probably do this if the body of work was entirely available in simple form (as in "a moderate amount of postings that aren't edited, purged, and made disappear automatically by most peoples' browsing settings"), and drew only simple conclusions ("there's 2000 articles that have the GNAA spam, as anyone can plainly see"), but in current form, this demands too much from the reader who wants valid, easily verifiable information. --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 13:46, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete per WP:NOR, WP:V as variously pointed out above. Also, chronicling the wasting of bandwidth by bored teenagers on the Internet is generally not an encyclopedic endeavour. Sandstein 09:17, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
Im not sure that "bored teenagers" is the most accurate way to describe the Slashdot readership, and leads me to wonder if you are actually familiar with the site you are voting against and the significance it holds. Dxco 15:49, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
I totally agree. A lot of them must be in their 20s by now. Recury 16:12, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm not voting against the site (I have a low 5-figure Slashdot user ID, incidentally) but against a pointless WP:OR article chronicling trolling on the site. I do assume the trolls (not, of course, the Slashdot readership) are mostly juveniles. Sandstein 16:48, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep. Slashdot is the "Grey Lady" of tech news, and one of the precursors to the entire blogging phenomenon. Articles concerning her unique culture are therefore notable, if properly referenced.—Perceval 01:31, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
We already have articles on Slashdot, the Slashdot effect and Slashdot's founders. The article presents no verifiable evidence that Slashdot trolling is unique. Slashdot subculture has recently been deleted for failing verifiability and original research policy. Bwithh 17:04, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
... but it's not. GassyGuy 06:51, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
...Articles aren't notable, if they were we'd be writing articles about them. Notability isn't the end-all and be all of inclusion, it's not even policy. This fails the fundamental and basic policy of verifiability. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 13:13, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep the article is self-defining it's own phenomenon. That in itself, like this page are all important historical records, of which another article could be written. Widefox 02:25, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
...Which is exactly the definition of original research. You've just provided an argument of why this article is inappropriate for wikipedia, not why it should be kept (except perhaps in an archive somewhere). Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 13:13, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Delete, I nominated the other two piles of slashdot OR for deletion but haven't gotten around to this one. I wish the nom hadn't mentioned notability, because that's not the issue here and has turned into a terrible distraction for debate. The problem is that the article is fundamentally unverifiable original research. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 13:13, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, I though I was foregrounding the original research and unverifiablity issues in the nom. the Strong Keeps seem mainly to be arguing from "i like it", "this article is actually well-written" and "anything about Slashdot is important" perspectives rather than from policy grounds (and I see encyclopedic notability as a function of WP:NOT, though I agree that WP:OR and WP:V are the most important here). Bwithh 17:04, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Keep, Keeping information on trolling is very difficult. Websites go down, links get lost, troll posts get deleted. Regardless if you read any of the trolltalk archives it is pretty apparent that trolling slashdot is definately a phenomenon and definately occurs. With trolling you can't really hope for external sources from the community being trolled because people documenting the trolling usually are heavily involved in the communities. In this case much of the trolling is immediately verifiable via trolltalk. There is evidence, you might not like it. --TrollHistorian 17:14, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
    • Reply This not acceptable evidence for wikipedia - you're asking that all the evidence comes from the trollers themselves . Even leaving aside the questionable acceptance of information from self-proclaimed trollers, this counts as unreliable original research which is not verifiable because of its unreliablity. You also need to prove reliably that slashdot trolling is substantively different from other trolling on other websites in an encyclopedically meaningful way (i.e. not "they make jokes about X on Slashdot while in comparison, they make jokes about Y on Fark - we know this because of the original posts on the websites".) Bwithh 00:33, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
You're misinterpretting/misrepresenting what I said. Regardless, Slashdot trolling created the GNAA. I don't see their article getting deleted anytime soon. --TrollHistorian 18:09, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Yes, yes, if a group of people get together, think up an imbecile name for their group and then insist on behaving like idiots as much as possible and as long as possible and go out of their way to irritate as many other people as possible, at some point they may be "successful" enough to get some media coverage for being a minor irritating pop culture phenomenon thats marginally and debatably notable enough for a wikipedia article. But that doesn't help this article which doesn't prove anything unique or significant Bwithh 00:33, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep -- since they deleted the Trolltalk article, this is the only place to get information on Trolltalk, a critical part of Slashdot trolling history which for literally years was the foundation and core of the Slashdot trolling scene. 4.253.46.228 22:27, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
    • Wikipedia is not supposed to be a primary source or the place for original research; you've just restated why this is inappropriate. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 00:08, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Keep -- The sorry guy who put this article for deletion should delete himself instead. Funny and informative. -- Femmina 22:59, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
    • That doesn't address any of the objections raised anywhere in this listing. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 00:08, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
    • If I had an article about myself on Wikipedia, I'd gladly speedy delete the article myself. "Funny and informative" is besides the point Bwithh 00:26, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.