This is the former location of the Comparison of BitTorrent sites. This page was deleted several times and now resides on wikia, an external wiki. For those interested, I have written a short history in memorial of it.
History
editThe Comparison of BitTorrent sites was started some time in either late 2005 or early 2006 (I have no way of knowing, as the history has been deleted). Originally a small comparison with four columns - the name of the site, whether it required registration to upload or download torrents, and any extra information - the comparison quickly became extremely popular. Many new sites were added and it soon became necessary to sort the comparison into categories.
Shortly after the comparison had been sorted into categories, a user nominated it for deletion, on the grounds that it was little more than a web directory. The AfD resulted in an almost unanimous delete vote. I could see which the way the wind was blowing before the AfD was closed, so I saved a copy of the article in my userspace, and the original article was deleted. I continued to work on the article for several months, adding, sourcing and updating columns, until I was satisfied that it was more of a comparison than a web directory and recreated the article.
The article was deleted again a few days later by Proto who cited CSD G4 (recreation of deleted content) as his justificaiton. However, CSD G4 states that, when deleting an article, the admin must make sure that the article in question is substantially identical to the original, and "having twice as much information on it" does not meet my definition of "substantially identical". I contacted Proto, alerting him of this. Proto chose to recreate the article in my userspace. I contacted him again, asking him to restory it to the mainspace, and he ignored me.
After waiting for a week with no reply, I took the page in question to deletion review and explained the situation. Some editors noted that the G4 was applied invalidly, and called for a relist on AfD, but the majority of them stated that they didn't think that the problems in the AfD were solved and that it would be redundant to run another AfD (despite the fact that official wikipedia policy states that it should be relisted). One of the editors even went so far as to accuse me of "processwanking". At this point I gave up and basically stopped editing/caring about wikipedia, coming out of my hole every now and then to fix obvious problems or source articles.
After leaving wikipedia alone for a while, I googled for the article in question one day. It had been moved to wikia, by no other than Angela Beesley, a co-founder of Wikia and a former member of the Wikipedia Foundation board of directors. Thanks for that, Angela. It's not the optimal solution and I very much doubt that it'll ever get edited again, and my username's gone from the edit history so I've lost credit as the main contributor of the article and it's barely going to get any exposure and my edit count has dropped by around 100 edits or so, but at least all my hard work han't gone completely to waste.
- You haven't lost credit for it. The credits are shown at the end of the article itself. Angela. 19:52, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
And there you have it. That's the story of the Comparison of BitTorrent sites, and the reason that I've all but left wikipedia.