DWM on Wikipedia Marked For Deletion

Posted February 25, 2010 – 12:20 in: Nullamatix, syndicated

Anselm, the “inventor of dwm” shared this information with the suckless mailing list yesterday. Apparently, Wikipedia has flagged the dwm (dynamic window manager from suckless.org) article for deletion. Anselm says he’s neutral and shared his thoughts on the Wikipedia Page, but what does this say about Wikipedia? A community built on free and open source software that promotes a free and “open” encyclopedia is now purging FOSS pages? Why, because Microsoft.com doesn’t have anything to say about dwm?

From the dev.suckless.org mailing list,

From: Thayer Williams
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:10:56 -0800

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 1:25 AM, Jason Ryan wrote:
> It points to a deficiency in the way Wikipedia views notability: it is quite
> at odds with the notion of influence and derivation that powers free and
> open source software…

Agreed. I said as much too. Under the current Wikipedia guidelines,
the vast majority of FOSS (and some proprietary) articles should be
deleted. It’s unfortunate and more than little ironic that a
community-based ‘open’ encyclopedia would undermine the exposure of
other community-oriented projects.

My hero and dependable source of entertainment for the day, Uriel, replied back with:

From: Uriel
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:42:03 +0100

The only thing that matters in wikipedia is your bureaucratic skills. You Germans should be able to master it!

uriel

Good job, Wikipedia. If you guys are going to start purging GNU/FOSS related pages, why don’t you go ahead and sign an advertising contract with Microsoft? dwm is one of the few window managers worth using and because dwm is “possibly non-notable” and lacking third-party sources (for what?), “the article clearly fails Wikipedia:Notability.” Wikipedia has become a money hungry community that seems to have lost focus, especially when pages are up for deletion because,

I can’t find anything myself via Google, though perhaps someone with better Google-fu can turn something up.

So let me get this straight: no Google = non-notable = no Wikipedia page. Wikipedia, you’ll never see a dime from me you greedy corporate sell out whores. You beg your users for money and purge pages that lack corporate sponsorship? Next time you’re looking for hand-outs, hit your big rich corporate buddies up. Wikipedia user “Psychonaut” – eat sh-t and live you nosy, racist, biased, deceptive prick. Seriously.

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