User talk:GameGod

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Hello, GameGod, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! Ysangkok (talk) 01:43, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

June 2023

It appears that you have been canvassing—leaving messages on a biased choice of users' talk pages to notify them of an ongoing community decision, debate, or vote—in order to influence Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bob Long Intimidator. While friendly notices are allowed, they should be limited and nonpartisan in distribution and should reflect a neutral point of view. Please do not post notices which are indiscriminately cross-posted, which espouse a certain point of view or side of a debate, or which are selectively sent only to those who are believed to hold the same opinion as you. Remember to respect Wikipedia's principle of consensus-building by allowing decisions to reflect the prevailing opinion among the community at large. Thank you. Posting on Reddit to find people to agree with you is not acceptable. Wikipedia works by consensus and following of notability guidelines not a vote count by canvassed editors Joseph2302 (talk) 10:19, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

I posted on Reddit to find topic experts who could shore up the references on the page that is proposed for deletion and to help engage in proposal for deletion. The proposal for deletion is inherently biased against the article, and the editor who proposed it has a history of hastily deleting paintball topics. As evidence of this, the Planet Eclipse Ego article was proposed for deletion by @Ajf773 on May 27th, 2023 and was deleted only a week later, with no editors opposing it. (With the Ego article, I agree that the article was of poor quality and should have been deleted, but I disagree with how quickly the decision was taken - 1 week is simply not enough time for enough people to see the warning and work on improving the page.)

For the record, some of the articles proposed for deletion by @Ajf773 are:

• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bob Long Intimidator
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/PGP_(paintball_marker)
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/BT-4_Combat
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Inline_blowback_(paintball)_(2nd_nomination)
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Planet_Eclipse_Ego
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Player_positions_(paintball)

The reason why canvassing for topic experts is necessary is because @Ajf773 and have been moving too quickly on deleting these articles and don't seem to have any awareness of the significance of the topics. In some cases, I think they're right and the articles are of too poor quality and are better off having the article deleted (like the Ego), but in other cases like the Sheridan PGP, the page is of good quality and describes a notable marker, we just need to improve the references so that it is clear it meets Wikipedia's notability guidelines.

What's frustrating about this is that it seems like there's a bunch of editors proposing sports articles for deletion (@Joseph2302, @Ajf773, @Oaktree b), then all agreeing with each other that an article isn't notable, then deleting them a week later. Based on the Talk pages for these articles, no effort is being made by these editors to actually improve the articles or develop an understanding of the topics to address the issues, they're just rushing to delete them. (I don't disagree with their decision in all cases, but the pattern is problematic. Unfortunately, some of these deleted articles are totally unavailable now, so I can't even form an opinion because the articles are gone. But if you're proposing to delete the PGP article, I'm concerned other articles that were worth saving have already been deleted.)

It's totally unrealistic and unacceptable to propose an article for deletion and actually delete it in 1 week. And frankly, it's a bit rich to then give me a warning for canvassing to find topic experts to actually help do the research you and other editors seem unwilling to do yourselves. Maintaining Wikipedia takes doing more than just lazily deleting unmaintained articles and you and others should be mindful that you sometimes need to recruit volunteers from outside the Wikipedia community, and that you should engage with them in way that nurture's their future contributions.

I skimmed through every early issue of Action Pursuit Games last night, which are fortunately archived here, to try to find good references for the Sheridan PGP, but it seems like it was released before the magazine was in print. It's probably worth going through those again to see if I missed anything. The marker was released so early in the sport that I'm not aware of any other contemporaneous print publications that would have mentioned it, but there probably are books or other reliable sources that mention it and support its notability, but it will take some time to find it.

Lastly, there is an ounce of arrogance in the way @Joseph2302 and @Ajf773 have been engaging with commenters on the deletion pages, including:

• @JML1148 dismissing player positions because of a lack of content found in articles they found online about it, which are not considered reliable sources by Wikipedia's standards, so there's a double standard here.
• @Ajf773 referring to paintball as a "low level sport" on the deletion page for Inline Blowback.

This behaviour is not conducive towards growing Wikipedia. GameGod (talk) 13:31, 20 June 2023 (UTC)