They want to delete the Wikipedia article

2 messages Satoshi Nakamoto July 20, 2010 — July 20, 2010
Satoshi Nakamoto July 20, 2010 Source · Permalink

The Bitcoin Wikipedia article has been nominated for deletion. Please help by contributing to the Wikipedia article and improving it so it meets Wikipedia’s standards.

Bitcoin is a remarkable cryptographic achievement and the ability to create something that is not duplicable in the digital world has enormous value.

I hope we can make the article better. The community has grown a lot since the article was first written. There should be enough content and references to satisfy Wikipedia’s notability requirements now.

Satoshi Nakamoto July 20, 2010 Source · Permalink

Bitcoin is an implementation of Wei Dai’s b-money proposal http://weidai.com/bmoney.txt on Cypherpunks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunks in 1998 and Nick Szabo’s Bitgold proposal http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html

The timing is strange, just as we are getting a rapid increase in 3rd party coverage after getting slashdotted.  I hope there’s not a big hurry to wrap the discussion and decide.  How long does Wikipedia typically leave a question like that open for comment?

It would help to condense the article and make it less promotional sounding as soon as possible.  Just letting people know what it is, where it fits into the electronic money space, not trying to convince them that it’s good.  They probably want something that just generally identifies what it is, not tries to explain all about how it works.

If you post in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bitcoin please don’t say “yeah, but bitcoin is really important and special so the rules shouldn’t apply” or argue that the rule is dumb or unfair.  That only makes it worse.  Try to address how the rule is satisfied.

Search “bitcoin” on google and see if you can find more big references in addition to the infoworld and slashdot ones.  There may be very recent stuff being written by reporters who heard about it from the slashdot article.

I hope it doesn’t get deleted.  If it does, it’ll be hard to overcome the presumption.  Institutional momentum is to stick with the last decision.  (edit: or at least I assume so, that’s how the world usually works, but maybe Wiki is different)