Wikipedia has continued its onslaught against the UFC. The online encyclopedia now threatens to delete many more UFC event pages, starting from UFC 2 onward.
The whole issue started with the Wikipedia pages for the UFC on FUEL events. Wikipedia editors deemed the events unworthy of having their own pages, seeing as they were insufficiently notable and tantamount to routine sports coverage—something that Wikipedia guidelines forbid.
The Wikipedia editors didn’t stop there. Now, dozens more wiki pages for UFC events are under siege. UFC 2 through UFC 41 are marked for deletion, the main reason being that the events don’t have the lasting significance that most Wikipedia entries about such things are required to have.
What are Wikipedia’s editors thinking? They’re just going by the guidelines (although it’s possible some have an axe to grind), which basically dictate the following:
Every routine baseball or football game doesn’t have its own wiki page, so why should each routine UFC event? Wikipedia is not a newspaper, so it shouldn’t have run-of-the-mill sports coverage you can see on regular sports websites. Furthermore, the events didn’t have any particularly impressive impact on the whole of society and aren’t exceptionally notable for anything (an example of a routine sports game that’s notable would be the Heidi Bowl) so they shouldn’t be occupying Wikipedia’s bandwidth; they are unworthy.
You can go to the deletion discussion pages for UFC 2 through UFC 41 and see the battle for the UFC’s place on Wikipedia being fought first-hand. For example, here are the ones for UFC 2 and UFC 30.
Furthermore, some of the more recent events, such as UFC 145, have been marked for deletion as of late. Fortunately, it was ultimately decided that the pages be kept.
Hopefully the events currently on the chopping block will be blessed with the same fate.
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