Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars (7th nomination)

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

The result of the debate was Keep. The arguments for keep suggest the page gives perspective towards edit wars. Additionally I'm not seeing any arguments here for deletion I can assign any particular heavy weight. I'm closing this as speedy keep, since I think we can see where this discussion is going. Navou ^banter 19:55, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars

This humor page has been around for a long time. As the 6 prior deletion discussions have indicated, a lot of people think it's funny -- and I agree, it is quite funny.

However, the unfortunate problem with WP:LAME is that it is, basically, a laugh at the expense of all involved in these edit wars. I am sure many of the participants in these edit wars were acting in good faith, and with serious convictions -- this is completely contradictory to our spirit of assuming good faith and remaining civil. (And in the cases where blatant trolls are responsible, we're simply giving them the recognition they crave.) Wikipedia doesn't need to be soulless of course, and humor pages are generally quite welcome, but humor at the expense of fellow Wikipedians like this page is detrimental to our community. Krimpet 04:29, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

• Keep The page is not a laugh, it's a reminder of how ridiculously wrong the Wikipedia process can go. I've actually curved budding wars by explicitly referring to it. Circeus 04:34, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. A reminder of what not to do can often be more useful than what to do — witness WP:NOT. A big part of the reason this page exists is to make the point that All edit wars are lame. If you find yourself in an edit war, you're doing something wrong, and deserve to be called on it. As TacoDeposit said in a past xFD for this page, "Mockery can be an effective deterrent.". I don't think this page encourages trolls — please provide a WP:CITE if you have evidence to the contrary.  :) Scanning the current version, I don't see anything calling out particular editors — it's making fun of the wars, not the people. (If you find an exception, just edit to remove it.) This page is generally civil, too. It make no hominem, personal, or vulgar attacks that I can find. Finally, this page is part of our WP:COMMUNITY, and provides value to the human element of Wikipedia. In short: "Citation needed"; provide evidence of harm or widespread problems and I'll look again. —DragonHawk (talk|hist) 05:05, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep I was the moron behind one of these edit wars, and I haven't been identified as the culprit (except for where I did so myself). The Wikipedians running this page do not point fingers, so I don't see how it could feed trolls or humiliate innocent blunderers. --Luigifan 11:27, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
• Oh, for Pete's sake, keep. Seriously? The six previous calls for deletion, all overwhelmingly defeated, didn't settle this? OK, I'll quote from my greatest hits from the last two nominations: "This page provides an incredibly useful venue for bewildered bystanders to let myopic edit warriors know how ludicrously short-sighted their edit wars are, and how silly and counterproductive they look to anyone with even a little perspective; it also holds up a series of cautionary examples that (hopefully) allows editors to think, before going to war over a misplaced comma or something, 'Do I really want to end up on WP:LAME?' Plus, the page is hilarious. Since it's outside the main wikipedia namespace and serves mainly as a repository of wikilore, I see no harm and great use and entertainment value in it." And: "It's sad that people view this as some kind of personal attack against them. It's meant to try to give people a bit of perspective on the amount of vitriol that they pour into fairly minor things. It is, to quote a long-ago defender of this page, 'awesomely useful.'" And: "Nothing on WP:LAME ought to imply that one side in the edit war is right; the point is that the struggle is titanic and vitriolic and ultimately not productive because of its vitriolic nature. If it is a 'personal attack', it constitutes an attack on people's rude, short-sighted, and unreasoanble conduct, not their views or factual assertions." And: "On more than one occasion, I have seen just the threat of adding an edit war to WP:LAME cause edit warriors on both sides to take a step back and approach their dispute more constructively. It is also a useful bit of institutional memory (in the sense of 'gosh, I wonder if anyone has ever pointed out that Gdansk used to be called Danzig before') and a repository of Wikilore. Since it is resident in the Wikipedia: space rather than the article space, it also quite frankly has a lower threshold for sticking around (it's not actually part of the encyclopedia, after all, just part of the ancillary community process.)" And that should do it from me... --Jfruh (talk) 05:11, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
• Speedy keep. Nomination raises no points that were not beaten to death in the previous six nominations. --Carnildo 06:19, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
• Keep - sadly, it often provides much-needed perspective on edit-wars - Alison ☺ 10:16, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
• Keep, useful to nip edit wars in the bud, so it's not just there for humour; If editors don't want to be on it then they know how to avoid being put on it. (What, someone's made these points already?). Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 16:50, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
• Delete — I'm not convinced there's such thing as a "lame edit war". Matthew 17:15, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
• Keep helps to put edit warriors in perspective, and pretty all the delete arguments have been rejected in the previous six nominations. Hut 8.5 17:30, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
• I'd speedy keep this, were it not for the risk that someone then might undo my keep, and my action would itself end up on Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars. See? That's the point of this page, reminds us to keep things in perspective, fear of being laughed at is certainly better than fear of being banned. Oh, and Keep. Heck, Speedy Keep! Let someone else make it on the page. --AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 19:43, 29 August 2007 (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 page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.