Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-08-08/Greenlighting Cyrus Farivar
Hoax exposé prompts attempt to delete author
A story in Slate relating the story of an internet hoax led to an attempt to have a Wikipedia article about the journalist who wrote the story deleted, after he indicated that he had started the article in question himself.
First, the hoax
The story, published 1 August, was called "Green-Collar Crime: How I stopped an Internet sex hoax". The author, freelance journalist
Wikipedia did in fact have an article on
himself following immediately behind to identify it as a hoax. The vote to delete the article was overwhelming, as the perpetrators of the hoax made surprisingly little effort to prevent this. However, the article has since been recreated to relate the story of the hoax itself.Next, the vanity
In the course of his story, Farivar mentioned the Wikipedia article about himself, saying, "Yes, I added an entry on myself to Wikipedia. Why haven't you?" His parenthetical statement prompted
Farivar's article was originally created 30 January 2005 by the IP address
In contrast with the vote regarding
This led GregNorc to complain to Wales, but Wales agreed that Snowspinner was correct and said, "Even if VfD _did_ produce a consensus that this article should be deleted, then VfD is broken and should be ignored". Afterwards, the trend of comments shifted to include many more editors who favored keeping the article. In the end, while a majority still favored deletion, it did not reach the 2/3 level normally considered the minimum to justify deleting an article, so it was kept.
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