[WikiEN-l] Proposed: stop all deletes for 6 months, then reconsider

Fri Nov 7 03:25:17 UTC 2003

I propose that we simply stop deleting anything for six months and use our energy to think about how we handle indicating the significance of entries instead. One exception: copyright complaints from rights holders and other legal process.

There are arguments that articles are not worth having. There is merit to those arguments. Everyone has a different threshold, though.

There are arguments for including almost anything which someone thinks is worth typing. There's merit to that as well. And again, we all have different thresholds.

The fundamental problem is not that things are good or bad, it's that we are not tackling the problem of how to indicate how significant things are.

Side issues are vandalism and such but moves and editing can take care of those with a quick move to [[vandalism: original title]]. The same applies to everything else.

So, stop deleting and spend our time and energy working out a killer specification for how to indicate that articles are or aren't significant. We'll end up with a far less contentious system and less stress for us all... and incidentally be well on our way to working out how we're going to select what to include in all of the subset editions of the Wikipedia.