have not been observed. The latter is only possible when the vote is started by a user without requirements or there is no reason to ask for the passage to an ordinary mode. In reality the Wikipedia’s system allows to elude any rule and stop any kind of procedure. And this is what happened to Arrigoni’s page, even if we make use of the Snowball Clause, which is an interpretation of the Fifth pillar: “Wikipedia has no hard-and-fast rules.”
foolish press campaigns.”
The Election campaigns, for those who are not used to the Wikipedian terminology, consist of asking to other users to vote and take part into a discussion “with the aim to alter consensus in favour of the supported position.” That is what was happening, as some administrators stated, to Vittorio Arrigoni’s article: they said that people who were opposed to the article’s removal started a virtual campaign (by sending messages to their contacts) able to involve thousands of people in short time.”
The reason of such clause is that “Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy and it is nonsense for a user to start any sort of action against it […]. Not only the user has no chance to succeed but he’ll also waste his, and everybody else, time”. In any case the procedure had already been started and most of the votes ended up considering the “entry encyclopedic.” The rules about it are clear: “a content cannot be removed before the vote deadline”, not even if the votes are all pro or against the content, not even if the administrator suggests its suspension based on the following reasons: “Vanity fair, Il secolo XIX, Facebook, blogs are promoting an election campaign, which is the consequence of an outstanding Italian ignorance, that has still been able to alter the sense of this discussion […] the current procedure is clearly a farse. It’s nonsense to go on, and expose ourselves to scattershot damages and
“Diritto di Critica”, a newspaper about politics and current affairs, feels the same way. After praising the propriety of Wikipedia’s “regular users”, and defining all the started procedures as “a problem that is part of a wellestablished practice”, its conclusion is that everything could have been “solved in few days and without controversies” if Il Popolo Viola had not arisen the issue with its post “Why 47