[WikiEN-l] Deletion is a tool

Fri Nov 7 03:08:22 UTC 2003

This is from Daniel Quinlan (quinlan at pathname.com),
not me.
----------------------------------------------------

Before I make a few comments, this should be discussed
on the talk page.
I don't subscribe to the lists because I already get
too much email and
I'd rather work on articles and help try to make
Wikipedia valuable
(which also includes collaborative editing work on VfD
and other pages
outside of the article space).

Deletion is a tool like any other.  I don't believe
anyone who has voted
on VfD to "delete" an article has proposed that *any*
bad article be
deleted.  A few people vote to keep articles nearly
100% of the time,
but since there aren't too many in comparison to
everyone else, the
strategy seems to be to push to end deletion.  I
suspect they equate
deletion with censorship or believe that all
information is worthwhile,
but before I go too deeply into anti-deletionism, I'd
rather talk about
why deletion is a valuable tool.

Let's talk about bad articles.  In evolution, maybe
we'd call them unfit
individuals.  For any Wikipedia article, there are two
basic attributes
that make it: (1) the title and (2) the content.

How do we improve bad articles?

  1. we rewrite them (original content becomes
history)
  2. we redirect them (original title becomes
secondary)
  3. we delete them (both title and content are
destroyed)

I'd hate to see one of our most basic tools removed.

Using redirection instead of deletion can never fix a
POV title, a
vandalism title, etc.  When someone creates 17
redirects to their own
personal article and makes it impossible to find
someone with a similar
name, redirection can't fix that either.  Deletion
takes bad articles
off of the radar of search engines and that's a good
thing.  And yes, it
destroys really bad content too and that's a good
thing.

I suspect much of the growing distress of some people
over deletion is
that as Wikipedia grows, the frequency with which new
articles need to
be deleted may be increasing, but I don't stress about
it.  No medium is
perfect.  There are more people on the internet, more
people finding
Wikipedia, and making contributions, etc.  That has
really helped
improve Wikipedia and if it side-effect is that more
vandals and
non-helpful people find us, I think we've dealt with
it pretty well.

Deletion also exerts a lot of evolutionary pressure on
editors.  If you
write a really inappropriate unencyclopedic article
(like "politician
So-and-so is evil"), it might be deleted.  A lot of
horrible articles
are rewritten regularly and removed from VfD because
there's pressure to
delete them.  That's good just like having polar bears
eat cute baby
seals is good.  If the content is worthwhile it will
come back and it
can still be easily undeleted (actually, much more
easily than it can be
deleted, I helped write both guidelines).  Of course,
vandals generally
don't ask to have their articles undeleted.  :-)

- Daniel

P.S. Please feel free to help with my redirect fix-up
project:

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump#Fixing_broken_links_with_redirects

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Daniel_Quinlan/redirects

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