[ExI] Alexander Chislenko article on English Wikipedia in danger of deletion

[Adrian Tymes]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 11:03 AM, david roman <aussiesta at hotmail.com> wrote:

>  I'm stunned to read the discussion in
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Alexander_Chislenko-
> One Wikieditor goes as far as writing:
>  Even worse. Hits in google search prove nothing. What we need is
> references to *reliable* sources. Google books hit lots of self-published
> garbage. "Transhumanists" produce floods of bullshit. Staszek Lem
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Staszek_Lem> (talk
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Staszek_Lem>) 19:35, 24 February
> 2016 (UTC)
>  Is this gutter level of discourse common, whenever one engages people
> outside the Transhumanist movement? I'm just curious, since I'm new at this
> and would like to be ready.
>

First: don't refer to that as "gutter" when there are far, far more
deserving targets for that label in common discourse, such as the current
leading Republican presidential candidates' views on science and most
scientific topics.  Using that kind of emotional tone where it isn't called
for (and it isn't in this case) will reinforce your defensive memes in a
way that makes it harder for you to understand what actually happened here,
leaving you angry and confused - which just feeds said defensive memes.

Second: yes, it is quite common to treat what you may think of as
transhumanist idols with, shall we say, much less respect than you think
they deserve.  In this case, that Wikipedian was demanding sources on what
other, neutral people said about Alexander Chislenko, since Wikipedia is
supposed to be about things found notable to the general public (not just
to certain small crowds), and found not much.

I will admit, I had never heard the name before this thread.  With no
emotional stake, I looked at the RfD and saw many people saying "no
reliable sources" versus one person trying to counter them all.  That kind
of situation tends, rightfully IMO, to result in the one person losing.  If
there really was that much larger of a crowd that found that man notable,
where were they?

Also, if there is that much bigger of a crowd, then how about recreating
the page, with a bunch of links to sources that are not his works in any
way, shape, or form, but are talking about him and what he did?  Although,
if you can't find many...that's the reason why the article got deleted:
others, who hadn't heard of him before, couldn't find them either.
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