RANT WARNING
For a long time now I have been becoming increasingly discouraged and sickened by the growing tendency of certain editors to remove or delete information added in good faith and sometimes with considerable effort, apparently for no other reason than that they are unfamiliar with the information and/or do not consider it of sufficient value to merit inclusion in Wikipedia. Depressingly often the only rationale for removing information is a perfunctory reference to Wikipedia "policies" (guidelines really) on trivia, notability, or original research (and occasionally more creative excuses, but those are the most destructive ones in my experience). It is very easy to raid articles looking for anything that is of no interest to you and is not quite ironclad enough not to fall foul of one conveniently broad interpretation or other of
at the risk of breaking my spine, let me bend over backwards one more time and refer to this excellent essay in which GlassCobra puts it much better than I doubt I could ever do. If you have ever felt the urge to delete anything other than obvious copyright violations or utterly blatant vandalism (the sort of thing that involves racial or sexist slurs or George Carlin's favorite vocabulary
), I strongly urge you to read it.
Back after a long absence, but I stand by my rant ;)
