I was greeted with this today: "Welcome to Wikipedia and thank you for your contributions. An article you recently created, Lost Lake, may not conform to some of Wikipedia's guidelines for new articles, so it will shortly be eletion policy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipediaeletion_policy">removed (if it hasn't been already). Please use the sandbox for any tests you may want to do and please read our introduction page to learn more about contributing. Thank you. Lil' Dice ^{(yeah, I said it!) - talk} 21:32, 5 May 2007 (UTC)"

It's one of Wiki's methods of communicating with its contributors. As far as I know I can reply to Lil' Dice by writing on their talk page. Here's what I wrote there:

Lost Lake

I was wondering if you couldn't be a little more vague as to the reasons Lost Lake shouldn't be in Wikipedia? Read what you wrote me, then tell me what content was in what you wrote? Does what you wrote me, meet Wikipedia's standards? Here is a little bit about Lost Lake in Mound: Council elections are won and lost over the issue of will Mound have new boat traffic? City Managers get fired when the dredge goes way over budget. Huge amounts of money get spent on removing old dumps on its shores. Are you saying Lost Lake is un-important? And why doesn't the deleted article show up in my contributions? Are we saying I have to keep copies now of what I write in case Wikipedia dis-appears it? I tried to write into the article, why Lost Lake is important? I wrote words to the effect that, it is key to our future, some believe, without being biased. Another happy Wikipedia user, huh? Nanabozho 17:48, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

What is Lil' Dice to do? Write so that people can understand them. Wikipedia would have a little bit to do with communication, don't you think? I can understand that there are lots of articles to delete, and time is money, but something beyond boilerplate when you dis-appear an article is asking too much? Lil' Dice doesn't know the first thing about Mound, Minnesota or its Lost Lake, yet they are in charge of it. Lil' Dice should have let the locals edit and revise the article, but when you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Lil' Dice then replies to my talk page: "To be a little more clear, I didn't believe your article met Notability guidelines, how could I verify that you weren't making up this "Lost Lake" ? See Wikipedia:Notability] Lil' Dice ^{(yeah, I said it!) - talk} 18:52, 6 May 2007 (UTC)"

I then reply on my talk page to the above: Nanabozho writes: If you Google Mound Minnesota Lost Lake with a bit of looking you will see that someone is building over 30 half million dollar townhouses on it called the Villas on Lost Lake. And that the City of Mound seems to have something on their site about it. So does this mean if I re-write the dis-appeared article, it will vanish again when the next volunteer sees it? Tell me what to do? I am kind of offended that you might think I just make places up, but I will get over that.

My comments: It seemed easy enough to do, to Google it.

Lil' Dice then replies to my talk page: Go read here for guidelines on writing an article about a lake. Don't be offended, you have to realize thousands of articles are created every hour and it's quite a chore sifting through the real ones and the fake ones, I'm doing my best to tell. Please read the guidelines for a Lake article and what other Lake articles look like and recreate it. Wikipedia:WikiProject_Lakes. Lil' Dice ^{(yeah, I said it!) - talk} 11:21, 7 May 2007 (UTC) Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Nanabozho"

So another crisis is solved, though I am uncertain if the next time I write about Lost Lake, the article will stick, so I'll keep my own copy of it. Someone had highlighted Lost Lake in another article. The highlight, when you clicked on it, brought up a screen to create a new article, in this case, one about Lost Lake. Maybe this is typical. I think what we see here, is an inefficiency of the system. And I think these inefficiencies are buried, by this being primarily a volunteer force of workers. It didn't cost Wikipedia any money for myself and Lil' Dice to waste our times with this exchange. Is this any way to get an article written, to make Wikipedia the place people go to learn about Lost Lake?

I bit later, when I think he/she realizes I am blogging about this, Lil Dice writes on my talk page: "Nanabozho, I'm truly sorry you hate wikipedia as you put on your blog, but I want to clear something up. I didn't delete your article, I simply marked it as speedy deletion, another administrator deleted it. You could have stopped the process by following the instructions of the warning by putting a {{hangon}} tag on the top of the article. Watching the new pages part of wikipedia is thankless work, you sift through hundreds of fake articles and once in a while you'll make a mistake and tag a legitimate article as fake. Once again I'm sorry, and I hope you contribute to wikipedia in the future. 00:35, 12 May 2007 (UTC)"

And so I learn about a {{hangon}} tag, and hope I can remember it, or even understand it. So if I don't get back to Wikipedia for a day, is the article still there to put the tag on before it's speedily deleted? Oh for heaven's sake, are we seeing a system that bureaucrats can navigate, but the common folk can't? Well in any case, as I say on my home page, I don't hate Wikipedia, but the domain name was too good to pass up. I am just a critic of it, who still uses it and contributes to it, depending on one's definition of contribution. 

This entry has been updated.

 

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