Great, now how much more money do they need to buy the disk space necessary to stop deletionism?
Deletionists feel they can approach perfection by mechanically removing content according to some standard, even when readers are finding it useful or enjoyable.
The (most commonly expressed) logic behind deletionism is that WP occupies a privileged place on the web and thus the onus is on the project to have content be verifiable, so that people can't stuff totally bogus topics at the tops of Google searches. The project can't verify content for non-notable subjects.
If that was the case, there would be no need for notability policy, merely the current verifiability standards. Unfortunately, there are many verifiable subjects of legitimate interest to people (startups, English Premier League reserve goalkeepers, fashion models who have only appeared on six magazine covers in their career, Iranian power plants) that deletionists want Wikipedia to forget about entirely because they aren't "notable".
... which again gives lie to the idea that the issue is "disk space".
I'm not trying to get sucked into this "deletionism" vs "inclusionism" argument, since those labels suck all the oxygen out of the discussion ("what, you're siding with people who think _why doesn't belong in WP?" --- of course not.) I'm just pointing out how bankrupt the original comment was.
If the verifiability argument were sufficient, the notability policies would all be scrapped and deletion policy would round down to "delete articles which don't have any verifiable statements in them, merge articles which are less than two or three full paragraphs long". Which, incidentally, was more or less the radical inclusionist platform back when I wasted time on Wikipedia.
I wrote a big long comment about a year and a half ago where I supposed that the problems probably boil down to "editing as sport" and "status seeking quests for adminship". Both lead to situations where editing decisions are made in a slipshod fashion and then defended to the death to avoid losing points in RfA's.
Deletionism is not one of the things that is broken about Wikipedia. Deletionism makes absolute sense. Wikipedia owns the Google SERPs, there is tremendous incentive to paste up bullshit articles for profit, and the sheer volume of crap --- take this from someone who spent 4 months patrolling AfD --- is staggering. The "pure" deletionist ideology is harsh, but it ultimately serves the greater good of the project.
In every one of these debates, I see people lose sight of the fundamental point of Wikipedia. It is not, as many people believe, a repository of all human knowledge. It's an encyclopedia. The point is not to have all possible articles. In fact, that's the opposite of the point. The point is to have only good articles, using nothing but volunteer work.
I too am done wasting time on Wikipedia, and I'm pretty grossed out by what happens when you look under the rock that is the Wikipedia: namespace. But I respect the project itself. It is tremendously, staggeringly successful. It is clearly doing something right.
Why don't we get to say that the fundamental point of Wikipedia is to be an aspiring repository of all human knowledge? Asserting that the reason for these policies is that it's [merely] an encyclopedia [more or less in the traditional sense] is self-fulfilling rhetoric. You say "the point is X" but I say "the point was Y, and could have continued to be if certain people didn't establish turf and assert control."
From my point of view, Wikipedia was on the way to being something much more than what it is now, and value was lost.
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/28/13512...
Not: o How many times have I sneezed today.
Barely: o The Ties of my Local Anchorman
Notable: o Pokemon Characters, _why, Canada
The first is that notability is in no small part a function of scale. Many things that would not make the cut in a global, space-limited encyclopedia are nevertheless in Wikipedia (properly) because they're notable to some niche of contributors/readers. But once you start having articles about some episode of a 1980s TV show, how can you, in good conscience, say that an article about a selectman in a small town or an athlete at a small college isn't also notable?
And verifiability gets interesting in this context. Effectively, verifiability puts disproportionate weight on verifiability through traditional media. Thus, presumably, school newspapers and the like would be considered an indication that something is indeed notable.
What, you say, the selectman appeared in a newspaper article? Congratulations: you're done. Cite it. The article will stick. Someone will inevitably try to delete it; you'll point to the sourcing at the bottom of the article, and you'll win the AfD.
It's really not complicated.
It is also NOT ABOUT "FAIR". Notability and verifiability aren't value judgements about subjects. They are judgements about the COMPATIBILITY of subjects with Wikipedia.
For whatever it's worth: _why has a page. Nobody ever tried to delete Canada. Pokemon characters have pages because they are easily verified.
Having just appreciated your criticism of a sarcastic and unhelpful comment, I hope you’re not turning to easy point-scoring yourself.
I used to be of the opinion that it was justified, but has realised lately that it has become a tool for political censorship. Some of the editing cliques have become very adept at suppressing unwanted views with dubious, but to many persuasive, application of the verifiability and notability policies.
My observation of this abuse of policy has been as a bystander by the way. I've never actively edited any articles on these subjects.
Typical subjects where there most certainly are well organized and ideologically motivated editorial cliques include US foreign policy, anything to do with Israel, Turkey and its history, anything relating to Islam etc.
Abuse of the notability policy is just one, but very effective, tool for censoring and controlling the content though.
(Also, apropos nothing, but because I just looked up who you are: that CRAM-MD5 proposal on your website is terribly broken; please don't recommend it to people.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Acces... says:
Because many deleted articles are found to contain defamatory or other legally suspect material, deleted pages are not permitted to be generally viewed. However, they remain in the database (at least temporarily) and are accessible to administrators, along with their edit history unless they are oversighted. Any user with a genuine reason to view a copy of a deleted page may request a temporary review (or simply ask an administrator to supply a copy of the page). Note that these requests are likely to be denied if the content has been deleted on legal grounds (such as defamation or copyright violation), or if no good reason is given for the request.
But if defamatory material is added to a popular article and reverted away, doesn't it remain in the edit history forever?
Or simply, knowing that it is likely to be deleted puts you off from contributing at all. I know that is one of the main reasons I have almost completely stopped contributing to Wikipedia.
And he's talking about the number of articles, if I'm not mistaken.