Someone’s gone and wiped some of the characters pages off Wikipedia etc?

[metalmarc]

Particularly Judge Death page was quite extensive on Wikipedia considering.

Not sure if it was damaged by a fan who is attempting to set up his own sites starting with http://www.judgedeath.co.uk/

Since it seems to be removed by an anonymous person last active 4 days ago & it was a decent resource for newer fans, looks like they started with one and have been slowly trimming down the other dredd related pages pages to suit themselves, if their end goal is to make money off previously free information they can sod off

But if it has been removed by someone officially which would be fair enough, especially if there was something new Official coming then that would be great.

But to be honest it looks like the information has been taken & deleted by one person to bring attention to their own site.

But also the same seems to be happening on the fandom wikia too, wll those months maybe years of content put in by hard working fans gone.

[Steve Green]

It doesn't look official to me based on the copyright notice in the about box.

If the same person who runs this has been deleting wikipedia entries, then that's a really shitty move.

[pauljholden]

I think it's possible for a different reading of what's going on:

a) Death doesn't deserve his own wikipedia entry (Though Dredd probably does).
b) A 2000AD fan / wikipedian probably knows that, and has deleted and collated the Judge Death stuff as part of a wider Judge Dredd section
c) but has decided that the information should still exist somewhere and has set up a website for it. (Remember the old days, when we had websites? they were great!)

I don't see anything stopping this interpretation from being true.

Plus I just looked at that Judge Death website and it has reviews - stuff which would never have belonged on wikiepedia, so it's possible they grabbed the wiki stuff long before it was deleted, to create that website.

I wouldn't be so quick to jump on the "They're doing this for profit!"
(Primarily because it's a niche within a niche, how much profit do you think they're gonna make??)

[johnfreeman]

I think it's possible for a different reading of what's going on:

a) Death doesn't deserve his own wikipedia entry (Though Dredd probably does).
b) A 2000AD fan / wikipedian probably knows that, and has deleted and collated the Judge Death stuff as part of a wider Judge Dredd section
c) but has decided that the information should still exist somewhere and has set up a website for it. (Remember the old days, when we had websites? they were great!)

I don't see anything stopping this interpretation from being true.

Plus I just looked at that Judge Death website and it has reviews - stuff which would never have belonged on wikiepedia, so it's possible they grabbed the wiki stuff long before it was deleted, to create that website.

I wouldn't be so quick to jump on the "They're doing this for profit!"
(Primarily because it's a niche within a niche, how much profit do you think they're gonna make??)

Wayback Machine has a snapshot of the page taken 17th December 2019 indicating the page had been targeted for deletion because "article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations" https://web.archive.org/web/20191217005209/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Death.

I'm afraid I am at a loss to ever understand the intricacies of Wikipedia.

[Steve Green]

I don't know about profit, but wanting to control that information seems equally dubious.

Especially since it can then easily disappear if they don't want to continue it, as as happened with plenty of other sites.

Now it has 4 lines of text for the dark judges entirely?

I don't see the negatives in leaving it alone.

[IndigoPrime]

Wikipedia's editors are a law unto themselves. They make decisions based on what should or shouldn't be in the guide – and they quite often get it wrong.

[Patrick]

As am occasional (but mostly burnt out) Wikipedian, I can give a bit of input into what's going on.

Wikipedia policy is that, for a topic to have its own article, it must be independently notable, with citations to reliable secondary sources to prove it. For some time, comics-related articles have ignored that, and articles about obscure supporting characters, harware, locations and so on have proliferated, cited only to issues of the comic they appeared in. This is known as "fancruft".

What's happened recently seems to be that the admins have noticed all the fancruft articles clogging up the Judge Dredd-related pages, and started proposing them for deletion on the basis that the subjects are not independently notable. I think this is generally a good thing, as what would best serve the subject would be a focused and informative central article on Judge Dredd that covers all the important aspects and characters, rather than a dispersed cloud of terrible articles about minutiae of no interest to anyone who doesn't know all about it already. But they may be getting a bit carried away.

Here's the page where proposals for deletion of comics-related articles are discussed, and here's the page where deletions are appealed. Anyone who wants to defend the notability of the articles that have been proposed or deleted, and who can provide reliable secondary sources (and can make sense of the markup) can stick their oar in. You don't even have to make an account (although it makes it easier to keep track of things if you do).

[Funt Solo]

I like the term "fancruft". I wonder how much of my code is cruft?

I find it difficult to take Wikipedia too seriously. Their entry on Witchcraft starts with "Witchcraft is the use of magical powers".  Uh-huh, because magic is real, sure.

It's a good place to get a general feel for a subject, but a shit place to get reliable facts.

To solve the original problem: get the information that was deleted from the way-back machine, become a Wikipedia editor (I think this step is necessary, but I'm not sure), put the information about Death on the Dredd page.

[Steve Green]

Not that it matters in a wider context, but it would be nice to have something outside of wikipedia, so any new readers who wants to fill in the gaps are able to do so.

[Tomwe]

This is what happened to the entry for Transformers The G1 Collection from Hachette. Luckly the info is all now over at tfwiki. Given the detail found on the entries for JDMC and 2000adUC I've said before it would really be a good plan to put it elsewhere. But the pages are now so detailed I've not found the time myself.

[sheridan]

Wikipedia has its uses, though use as a fictional encyclopaedia isn't one of them (it could be, but the deletionists have other ideas).  That's why I wouldn't put much too much time and effort into creating articles on there only for a deletionist to come along and get rid of it all.

It should be noted that if the person behind the judgedeath website is actually copying content from wikipedia then it should contain the correct copyright info.  Wikipedia is not public domain, though can be used as long as the correct licences are displayed (generally CC BY-SA or CC-BY-SA-compatible).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content

[sheridan]

To solve the original problem: get the information that was deleted from the way-back machine, become a Wikipedia editor (I think this step is necessary, but I'm not sure), put the information about Death on the Dredd page.

It wouldn't necessarily be safe there.  It may not be deleted but could still be heavily edited down.

[pauljholden]

Personally, I'd be very happy if 2000AD had its own official wiki, which is really where stuff like this belongs.

[sheridan]

Not that it matters in a wider context, but it would be nice to have something outside of wikipedia, so any new readers who wants to fill in the gaps are able to do so.

This is what happened to the entry for Transformers The G1 Collection from Hachette. Luckly the info is all now over at tfwiki. Given the detail found on the entries for JDMC and 2000adUC I've said before it would really be a good plan to put it elsewhere. But the pages are now so detailed I've not found the time myself.

*ahem*


2000ADopedia

[metalmarc]

Ahh thanks for the input the reason I brought it up in the first place as not only had it been wiped on wikipedia.org

But also fandom wiki which is a separately owned site owned by fandom entertainment (not wikipedia.org) but also edited by fans in the same way, also similarly wiped but not as much as Wikipedia.

Also he mentions something about the barney too

The account that put up the fansite only appeared on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/user/judgedeathfiles
Within the last 24 hours

And registered the name Judge Death Casefiles .co.uk as a website, just making sure newbies wouldn't think it was an official rebellion owned site.


Finally my concern was he'd direct traffic there since it was now missing from the free sites, whilst his fansite currently has no adverts my thought was there was nothing stopping him adding adverts once he gets enough traffic, possibly using his own content plus if he just copy pastes stuff from both those sites & barney then thats a bit cheap.

If it is all original content created by him though then thats cool.


But now I have more information since I first posted, it seems it may just be a genuine passionate fan piece of work with no ill intentions, lets hope so.