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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The problem Wikipedia sees for these very short articles that state nothing other than the fact that they were mentioned in passing in a newspaper article is that there is no potential for them to ever be good articles. The band is defunct, no additional reliable sources will ever be created for it, all available sources have been exhausted to produce an article of almost no value.

You're right that the article has some marginal value. I think many deletionists would even agree.

The problem is risk/reward. Every WP article is a commitment to defend a topic against entropy and malice. Every article is part of the attack surface exposed to vandals and spammers.

So in the view of most of Wikipedia, articles that are fated to forever remain "stubs" have negative net value.

Reasonable people can obviously disagree about this, but I find the deletionist argument against zombie stub articles to be very compelling.

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> Every WP article is a commitment to defend a topic against entropy and malice.

But at this point you've basically given up any attempt of civil community processes and you're doing things not because they are right, but because not doing them might give the enemy a speculative advantage.

I don't understand. My paraphrase of Wikipedia's position on (what I'm calling) zombie stub articles is that the risk/reward for them doesn't pan out. They have marginal positive value but pose significant risk of overhead and error.

But that's very much not the case with other stub articles, or even other zombie articles (where sources have no doubt been permanently exhausted, but the sources we have today make room for a solid 100 word article).

I my have read too much into the word "defend", but before my inner eye I saw all-out war against "them".

All over some moderately important issue, at best.

If that were true, we'd refuse to have articles on Middle East topics and tell people to look elsewhere, because it's an absolute nightmare and NPOV routinely loses to people with agendas. But it's worth it in the mission to be a comprehensive encyclopedia.

If this is really a problem, why not just lock the article at a stub with a few verifiable facts? How is this more editorial work than deleting, and fighting a subjective battle over notability?

Because it's obviously (well, to me) better to leave the article in the default state of not existing and have the option of allowing anyone to quickly add coverage, rather than needing a committee to unlock a topic if it does become relevant. This is good adherence to the "Wikipedia Is Not Paper" idea.

Except that there already exists a whole special mechanism for patrolling frequently created-then-deleted pages.

You only need to lock stub articles that repeatedly have people add unverifiable info to them.

Finally, if the pages doesn't exist, then anyone who wants to exercise the "option...to quickly add coverage" doesn't have access to the info that would have been contained in the stub!

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