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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 4215838" data-attributes="member: 14159">I certainly know quite well the frustration that comes from deletionists and goalpost-moving on Wikipedia.I spent several years and a hundred or so edits polishing and working on an article about a martial art I practice.  It's a relatively small art (maybe 1000 or so practitioners that have earned ranks in it, and about a dozen schools) and relatively new (founded twenty five years ago).  When I started the article, the rule was for something like that to be "notable" it had to have non-trivial mentions in multiple non-self-published media sources, so that there could be independent sources for fact-checking.  Each of the schools had a number of articles about them from local newspapers over the years, there are also a couple of books about it.  Those were just fine for sources and I made what I thought was a pretty decent article using them, with a few citations from their official website here and there.They started shuffling around the citation and sourcing rules, so that now any magazine article, book, or website produced by anybody with any affiliation with the martial art is now "vanity" and not reliable.  Never mind that the books were published by large and well known publishing houses that produce lots of respected martial arts books.  Never mind that the articles were in Black Belt Magazine, the most popular magazine about martial arts.  Because they were made by somebody with an interest in the school (even though it was independently edited and published) it is treated as "vanity" and unreliable.Somewhere along the way, the deletionists got to Martial Arts articles, and got this idea spread around that unless a system was 100+ years old or had over 100 separate schools it wasn't notable.  They never got that put into a formal policy, but they shouted it often and loud in deletion debates on martial arts articles so much that they got other people to treat it as if it was policy.  So, they moved the goalposts and an article goes from being obviously notable, to obviously non-notable.So, between the two an article I put a lot of labor trying to get up to "Good Article" status gets ripped apart as having no "reliable" sources, then being "non notable" and put up for deletion as being far below the "100 years or 100 schools" pseudo-guideline.</blockquote>

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