So, Black Kite just gave a brilliant example of who he is, and why he should no longer (and never should have been) a Wikipedia Administrator.
When he stumbled on the Wikipedia biography for author and computer science academic/historian Peter H. Salus, he was alarmed to see it had not had a single reference despite existing for fifteen years. I am not sure why he was so surprised, it is hardly a secret that referencing articles, even biographies, is not high on Wikipedia's list of priorities. With a single mouse click I can lay my hands on 2,000+ Wikipedia biographies with this exact problem. Right now. In 2019. Eighteen years after Wikipedia was born. From the bin marked 'shit for people to fix'. With three random clicks I found biographies dating from 2007, 2002 and 2013. So however/wherever Black Kite learned of this article, it clearly wasn't from rummaging through that bin looking for a useful way to donate his time to Wikipedia, even though the existence of that bin can justifiably be considered required knowledge for any Wikipedia Administrator.
However it was done, he found it in this state.....
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =838270504For an article like that, which was obviously not a hoax, if you are certain the article doesn't need any immediate rectification for reasons of law or ethics (up to and including the sort of things only an Administrator has the user rights to do), which it appears Black Kite did not, and if your own meagre efforts to improve the article fail, as it appears Black Kite's did (so much for the merits of experience and tenure, he has been on Wikipedia a very long time and made thousands of edits), then all you should do is appropriately tag it for maintenance issues (which it already was) and pass the job on to someone else, perhaps the WikiProject with the skills and expertise to know where to look for references.
What you do not do, and Wikipedia policy is crystal clear on this, is to (ab)use the deletion process to have the article's merits assessed and the quality improved under the impending threat of deletion. What you also do not do, is propose an article for deletion if there are plausible reasons to think it would not be deleted if it was improved in the basis the claims within it are plausible and the only barrier is proving them to be true to Wikipedia's current understanding of the concept. These are two sides of the same coin which are more easily expressed by the oft-heard simple mantra, 'Wikipedia deletion is not cleanup'.
Unsurprisingly, Black Kite did the thing you aren't meant to do. His reasoning showed his motives pretty well.....
Here's a BLP which may hold some sort of a record, having existed for 15 years without ever containing a single citation. It's clearly a guy who's written a whole load of books about UNIX and various other tech subjects, but I can't find anything about the actual person. Prove me wrong... Black Kite (talk) 22:41, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
We already know it was not a record. Not even close. And since we now know people found the required references and were easily able to improve the article, we can assume his efforts to fix it must have been equally incompetent. Given he seems to have seen this as a challenge he was issuing to his fellow volunteers, we can probably assume he didn't even lift a finger to look, except perhaps a cursory Google search, just to be able to rebuff any claims he had not done even that.
The idea this was some kind of challenge/test, that he was abusing the deletion process to prove some kind of point, or claim some form of reward or recognition, for finding what he mistakenly believes to be an exemplar case of Wikipedia failure (odd given his status as an Administrator means he is part of the problem), is bolstered by what he did minutes later. He posted the fact he had put this article up for deletion on the Wikipediocracy forum. Despite their claims to be a criticism site, they have a long history of being (ab?)used for this purpose, like an unofficial noticeboard where you can post work requests. This should not please those Wikipedians who see that site as a haven of harassers and other bottom feeding scum who do not have Wikipedia's best interests at heart in any way.
But that is now a widely depreciated view of that site even at the highest levels of Wikipedia governance, it is nowadays very much seen as a Wikipedia affiliate/adjunct by the present day power players of Wikipedia, scum like Black Kite. We are the true critics now, and as such he would not have dared post that request here, because we are not his little bitches. What would have greeted him is what I am doing here, exposing the truth of what he did, and why it no longer even raises eyebrows on Wikipedia. Understand that basic failure in self-governance and indeed self-awareness, and you understand every single systemic issue Wikipedia has. Such as their ongoing problem of unreferenced biographies.
Putting the icing on the cake, apparently Black Kite was not remotely embarrassed by the fact that once he had broadcast this case in this fashion, inside and outside of Wikipedia, the article was fixed up to his satisfaction in a little over 24 hours, suggesting it didn't even need any offline research. He therefore withdrew his own deletion nomination.
Needless to say, it is, or rather used to be, considered prima facie evidence by the Wikipedia community that an Administrator lacks the competence required for the role, or was otherwise abusing the process, if he has to regularly withdraw his own deletion nominations after 1/7th of the time it can be wikilegally be left open before an actually competent Administrator closes it with a decision. Once or twice might be a mistake, we all make them, but even here, Black Kite's own arrogance has shown this was no error.
There is lots of negative media coverage out there about Wikipedia right now which quite rightly interprets an attempt to delete a biography as a judgement the person was not notable, and therefore then the sight of Wikipedia either mistakenly deleting it or having to have their asses properly kicked to keep it, both bolstering the idea Wikipedians have absolutely no clue what they are doing.
It is perhaps a benefit to Wikipedia that the media's understanding of Wikipedia is so poor there is a good chance they might mistakenly interpret this case of abuse as a legitimate benefit, since a better article resulted. Insiders might even claim it is a valid abuse under the auspices of 'Ignore All Rules', on this idea Wikipedia is not meant to be a self-defeating bureaucracy.
That idea would of course fall flat, on the very obvious grounds that if you proposed to codify Black Kite's "challenge" approach as a legitimate use of Wikipedia deletion, to make it Wikipedia policy, you would cause a riot. To say inefficiency is the least of the problems it would cause in an environment where nobody is (theoretically) being paid for their efforts, is an understatement.
If Black Kite intends to keep pulling stunts like this, there might very well be a riot. Or so you would assume. But such is the decline of Wikipedia, that the sight of an Administrator not only doing this, but then also declaring "I must try a few more of these.", both in the official Wikipedia record, and on the website well known for (in the old days at least) for conducting subversive campaigns against the good order of the encyclopedia, often with the help of embedded moles and double-agents, no longer raises an eyebrow.
In the current climate, the media coverage of a Wikipedia Administrator circumventing normal processes to bump an old white dude in the academic/tech sector up the queue for having their contributions properly acknowledged by Wikipedia, would and should not go down very well. If they understood this is what happened. But since the Wikimedia Foundation won't give them a press release telling the media this is their truth, and you know for damn sure Black Kite isn't about to hang himself in the media, this will not be their truth as told by the members of the press.
We will never be sure what the real truth is as to how or why Black Kite stumbled upon this article and seemed so intent to fix it. But if you know the man at all from detailed observations, if you have ever seen now he reacts to queries or criticism, seen now freely he lies when the truth would harm his own self-interest, you really can't discount the motives of conflict of interest, or even a financial motive.
In truth, Black Kite is no double agent, he has always been quite open about who wins when he is faced with a conflict of abiding by the rules of Wikipedia and doing something he wants to do for his own self-interest or his personal idea of what is best for Wikipedia. Wikipediocracy has also often shown their willingness to ban people who highlight what Black Kite is. A corrupt piece of shit. Doesn't matter how polite you say it, or how compelling the evidence. The parallels with Wikipedia's reaction to evidence of Administrator misconduct are obvious.
He may even have just simply be pissed off that all the women and the minorities are getting the institutional and media attention for fixing up their Wikipedia articles as a priority for systemic bias reasons, and so wanted to do something for his people. There's good reason to think he thinks this way, given which Wikipedia editors and causes has defended in the past, and the fact Wikipediocracy is the venue of choice for so many people who think that way too. I don't know it for a fact, but I just know Black Kite is an old white dude who has a background in tech.
Wikipedia Administrators. This is who they are. This is why Wikipedia is what it is. This is why Wikipediocracy's supposed mission of shining a light into its dark crevices, is long forgotten. They're the creeps whose beady eyes reflect the light of your torches.