James Nicoll, the Alice B. Toklas of 21st Century Science Fiction

I gather that a struggle for the soul of Wikipedia is underway.

At present one battlefront is here, in a discussion of whether to delete the article on James D. Nicoll because, although he's notable, his notability derives mostly from the Net.

I think.

I'm not really up on Wikipolitical Philosophy.

Among others I know from SF and the Net, pnh has weighed in, in favor of "Keep." I liked this part; it's imaginative:

Valuable material is being deleted from Wikipedia by people who don't appear to understand what kind of things are valuable to literary scholarship. Nicoll is an aphorist and raconteur well known to--and influential upon--several different overlapping circles of professional SF and fantasy writers. As a frequent first reader for the SF Book Club his editorial judgement has a non-trivial impact on the field as well.

If we were talking about American writers in Paris in the 1920s, rather than the professional SF world today, by now there would be at least one full-length book about Nicoll written for a popular audience, a fistful of academic papers, and innumerable references in various interviews and memoirs; he's that kind of eccentric but important figure. If there's currently a dearth of print references to him, what that tells us is that the print-SF subculture lives more and more on the internet these days.

(A previous skirmish, over the question "Is the article on Kibo written in a properly formal tone?,"* was described recently at Making Light.)

* More interesting: "Does he grep Livejournal?"