Wikibooks:Requests for undeletion/Beating Season
I believe Beating Season was deleted with a total disregard for wikibooks policy. Not one person on the delete side could name how Beating Season was in conflict with the wikibooks purpose or rules. Deleting a book on the grounds of "being offensive" is not anywhere in wikibook's well documented policy, but yet, that is the sole reason Beating Season was destroyed. Instead of deleteing the book because it is found "offensive," I suggest the offended users get their wikian act together, and edit the book to make it non-offensive to them.
Furthermore, I am not sure of the exact count, but the votes were roughly 20 Keep, 6 Delete, and 1 Abstain. I surely hope wikibooks doesn't delete every book with a 20 keep - 6 delete vote count. Well, I guess I can't blame the people who voted delete, because Gentgeen, the very user who nominated Beating Season for deletion, posted very immature comments, and spammed the main page to make the keep side look bad (he posted IRON MY SHIRT Keep beating season! 500+ times). You can even see it in the pages' history. He used a couple of anon ip's to make the advocates of the book look bad.
I declare the deletion of Beating Season unjust, unfair, and extremely biased. Beating Season did not break any rules or policy, and only 6 people voted to delete it, while 20 voted to keep it. I expect better from wikibooks. Respectfully, Jm51 17:49, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- The book was intended to be a joke, not instructional material, and therefore was not in compliance with Wikibooks mission. If you'd like to provide evidence behind your libelous statements, I'd be amused to see it. Wikibooks does not provide its users the right to a secret vote on deletion matters, and does not extend the right to vote to anons, therefore all the unsigned votes are null, and the deletion tally stood at 8 delete vs. 2 keep. All together, this was a properly deleted book, and should stay deleted. Gentgeen 18:38, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- You may percive it as a joke, but others in other countries than your own may find it a valuable resource. Whether you will let yourself admit or not, the material outlined in the book can be useful for those who do practice. Just because it that practice is different than your culture "norm" does not mean we should be so quick to judge it, and dismiss it as "a joke." Anon users make up most of the page views on the metawiki sites. Furthermore, I reviewed the history, and the majority of them were not sockpuppets. A few valiant supports voted more than once, but given the circumstances (culturally intolerant wikibookians attempting to wipe their beloved resource away), I can't blame them. Nowhere in wikibook's policy does it count anon voters as "null," in fact, anon users often edit pages and contribute. They are part of the wikibooks community and their votes do count. Jm51 21 a tasteless joke, as much as a joke as the "keep" votes were, none of which came from anyone in the wikibooks community (except the one keep vote by Jm51). Further, Jm51: you should read up about libel law and the legal implications of your slandering. MShonle 20:16, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Because they disagree with you, they 'must be' to be "joke" users (after all, who would dare disagree with your viewpoints?). See above. Anon users contribute and are part of the wikibooks community. Further: Mshonle, you should look at a map of the world. Not everybody lives in America. Jm51 21:26, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Since nobody can prove how beating season broke wikibooks' policy, I demand it be undeleted now. Jm51 23:09, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Well, obviously, "proof" is too much to ask for. Policy is a guideline; not a set of mathematical axioms by which one can reach an unambiguous decision through logical reasoning. What's more, policy is not written in stone. It's written by us, the collective contributors to Wikibooks. You, of course, are one such contributor, but barring votes which were perceived as being cast in bad faith (through sockpuppets and users whose only edits were to the delete page), the consensus was to delete. You may rightly complain that policy was not clear enough; that merely means policy could be amended, not that we are somehow required to keep the book. Wikibooks is neither just nor rule-based, as no wiki is; there is no principle of "innocent until proven guilty".
That said, let us review why this book should be deleted, and why it is inappropriate for Wikibooks, applying current policy only. Let us first dispense with the myth that it was deleted because it was offensive, or not conforming to someone's cultural bias. These are not criteria, even though everybody is allowed their personal opinion. Personally, I hardly considered it offensive, just tasteless and lacking style. There is first of all #4: Wikibooks is not a place for fiction text. As several contributors pointed out, certain things were just plain made up. Then there's #9: Wikibooks is not a place for primary research. To my knowledge, there is no previous research on "how to beat your wife". If there is, I sincerely question that it was accurately summarized in the module.
I agree that current policy is not strong enough to unambiguously decide deletion based on precedent. That's why I'd like to thank you for helping us set precedent: consensus is that this text is not appropriate. Even if we have not enunciated exactly why this is so, and how we should generalize the decision, it is nevertheless a decision. We are not required to justify our votes using current policy only to make the decision valid; that's always nice, but not a requirement.
In short: Wikibooks is a work in progress. Some of our decisions may be wrong, others may be right, but just not supported by current policy. I firmly believe we have a case of the latter. JRM 23:33, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Keep deleted. Ambi 09:56, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)