What are your experiences with them?

How much is it of a holywars place, and how do the admins handle the holywars?

I don't know if ReyBrujo is still lurking around here, but he used to spend a lot of time cleaning up Wikipedia.

I thought that ReyBrujo was actually employed by Wikiedia...

Apart from donating cold hard money, I have not contributed anything.

<zen>
Do what you do. When you are done, let go of it and be in the Here And Now. Your emotional suffering (being pissed off) is a consequence of not accepting the fact that it was deleted and of attaching a negative valuation to the deletion.

Stop your perception after the fact "the article was deleted" and do not proceed towards judgement and emotional reaction.
</zen>

<zen>
It makes sense. There is potential for emotional suffering in it because of the implied negative valuation that "losing" or "doing it for nothing" is bad or that doing it would have been a "waste of your time" if your contributions are changed/deleted/whateverified or maybe even if you are doing it without a reward. You only do as much as you want to do and then you let go of it and move on. You should reward yourself if you want to and keep in mind that your "experience while doing" is not nullified regardless of what is going to "happen" to your contributions.
</zen>

It works for me and I consider it to be helpful and wise to reduce unnecessary and painful emotional suffering. With practice, it might work for you as well. If you have any specific questions or comments on which parts you consider irrational, I will try to explain to the best of my knowledge (not a zen master myself).

Zen is about being Here And Now without worrying/fantasizing about the past or the uncertain future (your thoughts were in the uncertain future there with a fixed expectation about how it was going to be).

This pattern of thought (specifically the "only to") is what nullifies the effort (but only in your mind). The experience of writing/creating what you created is still yours to keep and can not be nullified by anything other than your own judgement/valuation about what happened to it. In fact you already know that, except you attach an unnecessary negative emotion to it (see near further down in this post *).

Zen is about being, not about pretending. It is also not about pretending to not care or not caring. It is about being in the Here And Now with your thoughts and body, to do what you are doing right now and to fully commit yourself to that activity. If you manage to do that with everything you do and if at anytime you realize that your thoughts are straying to the past or the future, you direct your thoughts back to the moment and the current activity and you will care, you will care a lot for it is the current activity itself which is important in zen.

An example: Your life could be over anytime, in a minute, a day, a week, a month, a year, ten years. Being Here And Now with your thoughts and committing yourself fully to your current activity is what is enabling you to not constantly worry about that and care about your current activity even though you theoretically know it will all have been "for nothing" in the very end.

You feel you are not getting pissed for nothing but it is unnecessary emotional suffering here *. Your goal was to create something which would last for years. You did not achieve that goal in this one instance, got pissed by it * and based on that experience decided to think twice next time and do something about it and you formed in your mind the overgeneralized rule that Wikipedia in its entirety is not necessarily worthwhile to contribute to.

You could mindfully reach the same conclusion without getting pissed, without suffering through that negative emotion if you stop your thoughts after the perception of the fact about the deletion of your contributions and still decide not to contribute again to that topic or Wikipedia in its entirety. The consequences are the same, with or without emotional suffering attached to it.

That being said. If you analyze your thoughts closely, you might come to the conclusion that you did not get pissed by the deletion of your contributions but rather by the fact that your expectations (thoughts about the future during your activity) were not met.

The disappointment accompanying that is understandable.

Had you been Here And Now with your thoughts during the activity itself (writing your contributions =: x) and also Here And Now when you noticed the article was deleted (whatever you were doing at that moment =: y), your mind would not have had much of a chance to suffer emotionally, because you would have not worried/fantasized about the future during x and also you would not have worried about the immutable past during y.

How does living in the present and not being pissed off sound stupid?

Unless you prefer to be pissed off over being neutral.

What Dennis is describing is more of a life perspective. Nobody should expect of you to understand it or even accept it. Though stupid is not how I would describe it.

As already written. Zen is not about pretending. In Zen the value is in the activity itself. When it is done, the next activity comes along. This ensures there is value, always and at any given moment. Zen is about being, not about having. In terms of "value": Everything you do is value. That is zen.

That seems quite unspecific and wrong in this context. Zen is not about not "having" any feelings at all. Being mindful about your feelings is to analyze and see where they are pointless, where they cause unnecessary emotional suffering. Putting value on things and attaching feelings to things is a source for potential suffering, especially if the consequences you draw from that have a potential to cause even more suffering.

If you practice Zen, everything "matters", for as written above, the value is already in the activity itself.

No need to be sorry. I am enjoying this activity (writing to you about zen). It is a great opportunity for me to reflect upon my own understanding of it.

append

That is correct and being pedantic is how I am. The great thing about zen is, it helps me to eliminate, at the very least to be mindful about my own unnecessary emotional suffering which is/was caused by being pedantic/rigid about many things and irrational personal rules and hardwired emotional responses about how things should be how they should be "valued".

I don't think Dennis is a "Stone Buddha", which is a typical logical fallacy/tendency of those who have seemingly little more than a passing knowing of the Buddhist dialogue/continuum, to make.

I guess that depends on how you big and scary you are

What an insightful discussion of Wikipedia.

I think in 2006 or so I created a fake account on Wikipedia and marked lots of uninteresting articles for deletion. About two thirds were successful. It was fun seeing the deletion discussions and votes and (sometimes) the overturn-of-action discussions even after there was a decision to delete/keep :x