There are frequent complaints (here and elsewhere) that Wikipedia editing has gatekeepers. And if you want to edit the article on Donald Trump, change the history of the Troubles in Ireland, or claim something about who owns the Spratly Islands, there are gatekeepers. If you want to work on the vast swaths of the encyclopedia that aren’t complete and aren’t hot political topics, it’s rare that you will come across any response to your edits at all.
That’s not my experience. These days I find innocuous edits to innocuous articles are very often reverted by someone who has appointed themselves the authority on the article in question. Only edits they really like will stay.
I do need to explicitly call out one point here. Making edits to an existing page is often ignored. Creating a new page is always reviewed by somebody; and there is a consistent backlog due to a lack of volunteers to do the reviewing. As a result, many promising stub articles are treated quickly and poorly. There’s no solution here other than to find more reviewers (which does take quite a bit of project-specific knowledge; you need to understand reference formatting, categories, article structure, etc.).
Technically, your content wasn’t “deleted”, it was “draftified”. This can fairly be called an arcane technical detail.
The important difference is that you can click a button to ask someone else to review the removal.
The second issue is that the only source is the 2021 World Happiness Report itself, which appears to have invented the term. If a term is recently invented and hasn’t been discussed by anyone else, it will not have a stand-alone Wikipedia article. (you can complain about “notability” if you want, to somebody else). The term is discussed in the article on the World Happiness Report. Why aren’t you happy with that?
The term is discussed in the article on the World Happiness Report.
While this is technically true in this case, it seems like the person who deleted it didn’t notice given that the page should redirect to the section of the World Happiness Report.
The initial policy of Wikipedia to allow stubs was better then the status quo where stubs get deleted or drafified.
Probably getting into too much detail on this specific case here, but the term (though recent) wasn’t invented in the WHR; I’ve also come across it eg in a book by Richard Layard, and I expect also occurs in various academic papers. But by draftifying the article the editor assumed that it’s probably wrong or unnotable. I reckon new stub articles, particularly coherent ones that seem to have been written by someone who knows the subject matter, should be given the benefit of the doubt (as was once the case), and assumed ‘probably ok’ until shown otherwise, rather than ‘probably not’.
There are frequent complaints (here and elsewhere) that Wikipedia editing has gatekeepers. And if you want to edit the article on Donald Trump, change the history of the Troubles in Ireland, or claim something about who owns the Spratly Islands, there are gatekeepers. If you want to work on the vast swaths of the encyclopedia that aren’t complete and aren’t hot political topics, it’s rare that you will come across any response to your edits at all.
That’s not my experience. These days I find innocuous edits to innocuous articles are very often reverted by someone who has appointed themselves the authority on the article in question. Only edits they really like will stay.
I do need to explicitly call out one point here. Making edits to an existing page is often ignored. Creating a new page is always reviewed by somebody; and there is a consistent backlog due to a lack of volunteers to do the reviewing. As a result, many promising stub articles are treated quickly and poorly. There’s no solution here other than to find more reviewers (which does take quite a bit of project-specific knowledge; you need to understand reference formatting, categories, article structure, etc.).
Regarding WELLBY specifically:
Technically, your content wasn’t “deleted”, it was “draftified”. This can fairly be called an arcane technical detail.
The important difference is that you can click a button to ask someone else to review the removal.
The second issue is that the only source is the 2021 World Happiness Report itself, which appears to have invented the term. If a term is recently invented and hasn’t been discussed by anyone else, it will not have a stand-alone Wikipedia article. (you can complain about “notability” if you want, to somebody else). The term is discussed in the article on the World Happiness Report. Why aren’t you happy with that?
While this is technically true in this case, it seems like the person who deleted it didn’t notice given that the page should redirect to the section of the World Happiness Report.
The initial policy of Wikipedia to allow stubs was better then the status quo where stubs get deleted or drafified.
You’re absolutely correct that the page should have been made into a redirect rather than turned into a draft. Mistakes happen; you can fix it.
Probably getting into too much detail on this specific case here, but the term (though recent) wasn’t invented in the WHR; I’ve also come across it eg in a book by Richard Layard, and I expect also occurs in various academic papers. But by draftifying the article the editor assumed that it’s probably wrong or unnotable. I reckon new stub articles, particularly coherent ones that seem to have been written by someone who knows the subject matter, should be given the benefit of the doubt (as was once the case), and assumed ‘probably ok’ until shown otherwise, rather than ‘probably not’.
Especially, stubs about intellectual concepts as compared to stubs about people where bad articles might produce Living People concerns.
Having stubs makes it easy for people to contribute by making the stubs better.