The cover of the latest Comics Buyers Guide (#1663) has the caption "Peter David takes on Wikipedia!" Peter David, a comic book writer, is a long-time regular columnist with CBG. His column is titled "Doing battle with the Deletionists; Wiki wha?" It concerns Wikipedia's deletion of the article on Kristian Ayre, an actor David worked with on the TV series Space Cases. David ridicules the "deletionist" Wikipedian who started the AFD debate (without actually naming him/her/it), noting flawed statements in the justification for the deletion such as that Kristian "was an actress with no major roles in anything"... according to David, Kristian had a co-starring role on Space Cases, "and, oh, yeah -- Kristian's a guy." After the AFD showed no clear consensus, the article got deleted anyway, causing David to launch into a criticism of Wikipedia's concept of "notability", which apparently requires published references in non-online sources; he closes with "Feel free to use this [column] as the basis to create a Wikipedia entry for him." It looks like nobody has, so far.

David appears to be of the opinion that having a BLP biography on a particular person is a good thing for them, and deleting articles on people with no clear consensus is a bad thing, which makes his basis for criticism of Wikipedia somewhat opposite to that of many here on WR.

Looks like the article is back already.

Yep, it is, since January 20. Funny... I did a search earlier today and didn't find it; I must have done something wrong then.

The original AFD:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Art...n/Kristian_Ayre

Too bad it wasn't originally deleted due to BLP problems.

How far Wikipedia's come!

Reading the many opinion pieces decrying Wikipedia's restrictive notability policies... I often find myself disagreeing, if only for their rather skewed view of how AfD and notability works. You have to work "on the inside" before you get a real sense for it.

To be fair, these press-based inclusionists have some points. But they disregard the manpower needed to scrub the poor-quality articles that inevitably result and stretch resources ever thinner. In short, they think in terms of unlimited server space, not limited human capital.

Of course, Wikipedians are oft a touchy bunch, and writing an editorial is often enough to keep you around (i.e. Timothy Noah, Stacy Schiff).

Collectonian might make mistakes and step on people's toes, but she's a major force in reining in manga and comic book cruft, and should be applauded for her efforts.

Darn; I thought I'd be the first one to cite this article in a BLP discussion.

With 22 references, no less. Some to the guy's own website.

Oh, wait. Less actual references than it first appears