Wobbly Universe

There has been a steady campaign to delete articles and categories relating to cycles from wikipedia, sometimes preceded by an effort to make them factually incorrect so that they are more worthy of deletion. I will deal with a single instance here, the deletion of the category:cycles.

The person proposing deletion (AFAIK because the detail is gone) was "Delete. No argument. siafu 23:22, 20 September 2005 (UTC)" who obviously gives no reason why there should not be a category called cycles.

The deletion article above finished with the comment "# Closing note. Discounted sock-puppet votes. 5 total, 4 del, 1 keep. ∞Who?¿? 01:58, 28 September 2005 (UTC)" which is presumably supposed to show that justice was done. Well I have counted the votes in the article and there are 5 for keep and 3 for delete. That is a majority for keep. The accusation of sock puppets is one made repeatedly in trying to delete cycles articles and has been specifically directed at me in the past. For those that do not know what a sock puppet is, it is a made up login to wikipedia that is really the same person, created for the purpose of double voting. I have never done this and I am pretty sure that there are no sock puppets involved in this case because I know a number of the names from an interdisciplinary cycles discussion forum (which exists and has 400 members in spite of the fact that these people claim there is no such area of study).

If there are sock puppets involved, the procedure that talleys votes should say who they are so they have a chance to reply otherwise the vote is simply being tampered with. I challenge those that run these things in wikipedia to account for their actions. This is not an isolated case.

The only validity to the arguments given for deletion was that several of the articles perhaps should not have been in the category. However given that being corrected (the obvious correct decision rather than deleting the category) the category did satisfy the stated objective of the reason for inclusion in the category being obvious.

A subsequent category:cycle was created and suffered a similar fate, largely because the deleters move in droves together and get something deleted before those who know about the subject are even aware of it. They even have clubs for organising these deletions. The argument put forward for deletion of this category was "Aside from the fact that these things occur in cycles, they have nothing in common". Well you might say that apart from all being countries, what do category:country have in common or any other category. That is the whole point of a category isn't it?