167? That's quite impressive. Meanwhile Mauchline, the town of pop. ~4500, famous for it's fine dairy produce, crystal glass engravings, curling stones, prehistoric cup and ring markings, and once having been home to Robert Burns (resulting in half the street names being changed along with a 80ft tower being built in his honour)...doesn't have an entry.

Polgara the Sorceress has an entry, though. A fairly extensive one, rather than the "smug bint David Eddings wrote into his fantasy novels to stay on the good side of his missus" that the subject deserves.

It's not the most impressive reference resource, is it?

er, "39 families".

Three of the six people voting for deletion are members of a group called the Association of Deletionist Wikipedians and one of the seven people voting for keeping is a member of the Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians.
Of the ADW crew, two dismiss PE(aott) as "not notable" without stating why the strip is not notable. The other deletionist simply says "webcomics shouldn't need wikipedia to gain their reputation" (which I'm not doing -- a survey of my referral logs shows that I've had up to four people visit the site from the main listing and up to ten times as many visits from the Votes for Deletion page). Of the other two that argue for deletion, one says she's never heard of the comic strip and if she's never heard of the comic strip it shouldn't be in there. The other says that the Alexa rank of thesnakefarm.com "suggests a lack of notability". (To this, I can only point to the rank of PE(aott) on webcomics.com and that site's Alexa rank and the rank of The Nice's main page.)

The inclusionist member points out that the guidelines are simply guidelines and argues against the non-notability factor. Fanbase support comes in from two readers along with a simple "keep" that is not expanded on. Two others argue for it with actual arguments that have merit -- they point to the Websnark Wikipedia Webcomics thing and point out that the guidelines for webcomics are [1] not Wikipedia policy and [2] are "needlessly strident".

I find the Votes for Deletion page very interesting. For the most part, the "Delete" crowd is falling back on guidelines proposed to keep "vanity webcomics" from cluttering up the Wikipedia; at least half of the "Keep" crowd seems to argue that these guidelines are outdated and should give way to new criteria.

Just to clear things up, Wikipedia is a community. As it stands, you can't judge the whole community based on a single VfD, because after all, this is a free encyclopedia, with hundreds of contributors contributing thousands of things every day. We can't always keep up with everything, and get to some priorities quicker than others. Do certain fan articles deserve deletion, that we won't get to right away? Most certainly. Do unnoticed subjects deserve inclusion, that we may not get to? Of course. We have a saying at Wikipedia to "be bold in editing pages," encouraging people to contribute. If something's there that you think should be there, go right ahead and contribute. What goes along with that is that we get a lot of brilliant stuff on it, and a lot of junk, too.

As for your particular vote, please don't be insulted. Concerning fiction, I, myself, am a deletionist, and have tried to work on deleting a lot of the very minute articles on shows like "Futurama," which is a series I love. But when articles about individual jokes like "The Space Pope" come up, well - they've got to be deleted, because they have no notability beyond their parent. We get a cadre of webcomics every day on the site, and what stands as being "notable" is highly controversial; we've been working on this to make it into clearer terms.

Honestly, I'm not sure where PE(aott) stands in the way of notability as pertaining to webcomics. I didn't vote on the thing. But in any case, this looks like a fine comic you've got here. I think I'll bookmark it.

Thanks for the kind words. I've looked a bit more into the deletion lingo and found that "not notable" is in fact shorthand for a longer explanation of why it's "not notable" and not a simple out of hand dismissing of an item.

I still find the whole VfD process rather interesting -- I like the community vote idea and that it's not just an arbitrary "I don't think this belongs here so I'm going to delete it right away." That there's an actual discussion is great.

Right now I don't want PE(aott)'s entry to pass the VfD simply because I want it in there, I want it to pass in hopes that it'll allow for a restructuring of the Wikipedia:Web Comics guidelines. (Plus it'd be neat to have a wikipedia entry.)

Where I would draw the line, if I were a drawer of lines instead of a cartoonist, is allow comics in if (and probably only if) the comic strip has had about 150 updates in a calendar year at some point in the comic's history. This equates to at least 50 weeks of a MWF comic, something that would show that the comic has been worked on for a long enough period that it had outgrown the "impulse comic" and "vanity comic" stages. But there'd be loopholes to allow something like Syke's works at Shivae Studios in.

But yeah, I see where you'd want to keep the wiki lean.

I submitted it for deletion not because I want all webcomics deleted, but because it seemed pretty non-notable and I found you were asking your readers to write it up. That stunk of sneaking advertising into Wikipedia to me.

Advertising? Bah. The only thing being advertised I could see was Wikipedia.

Not that it doesn't need it. Whenever I google for something that Wikipedia covers I find half a dozen sites ripping off Wikipedia by mirroring them without attribution and using pagerank tricks to push themselves above Wikipedia on Google's list. that's something you should be worrying about, not a real webcomic that's been running for years whose artist thought Wikipedia was neat.

I totally understand why Ashibaka put it up to the VfD process -- there was a guideline for inclusion of items into the Wikipedia, but cases like mine have to be made to challenge those accepted guidelines especially when a new set of criteria for inclusion is proposed. As the PE(aott) entry came about right after that new criteria was suggested, this is equivalent to a court case going through the motions to get to the Supreme Court to see if a federal or state law is constitutional. There's a process that has to be taken to change things in a place that's well-ordered like Wikipedia. Consider this VfD test to be webcomic's version of "Brown v. Board of Education". (I sure will! My ego knows no bounds!)

Sounds like it'll be up there with the Judge Dredd decision.

And Brown won!

P.S. there seems to be a lot of Wikipedia-bashing on here, and I must protest this. Wikipedia is awesome. The end.

Wikipedia is awesome, and needs to pull its thumb out and do something about the scurvy dogs ripping it off with their pagerank games.