[WikiEN-l] Rampant Deletionism

Thu Nov 6 13:02:14 UTC 2003

I haven't really edited on Wikipedia for a while, and I checked in
because I wanted to add some content. But a quick perusal of my
watchlist showed that the votes for deletion situation is ridiculous. 

The removal of any guidelines for inclusion on vfd (including the most
important one: when in doubt, don't delete) is criminal.

So is the separation of guidelines for "regular" people and for
administrators.

So is the "merge and delete" attitude. Merging entries into big messes
under general titles is much, much worse for the long term health of
Wikipedia than having many entries with specific titles.

So is the "kill all ephemera" rampage, since presuming that we know now
what will be considered ephemera 10, 20, and 1000 years from now is
pathetically presumptive, especially considering there are NO SPACE
LIMITATIONS on Wikipedia.

So is the obvious takeover of the VfD page by a horde of deletionists.
Once upon a time one vote against deletion was enough to stop deletion.
And that is all it should take.

So is, imho, the renewed assault on the sep. 11 pages, but I guess
that's to be expected, since the argument "some people put so much work
into carefully researching the reports on the lives of the people killed
that day and creating entries for them, and we can't be bothered to do
the same for other people who have been killed, so we should delete all
the entries" will never die.

Again, now that we have better stub-indication technology, there should
be *less* need for deletion, rather than more.

Also, if a page has been around for a year or two and been seen by a
bunch of eyeballs, there's probably a reason it's there, and it probably
shouldn't be deleted.

yours,
tc