[WikiEN-l] Rampant Deletionism

Fri Nov 7 13:33:10 UTC 2003

Delirium wrote:
> My main question is that it makes Wikipedia look ridiculous, and makes 
> information harder to find.  If I search for "Michael Jordan" and get 
> 4,000 results consisting of every person who has ever been named 
> "Michael Jordan", that's *much* less useful than the current state, and 
> a bit laughable.  Wikipedia is not a geneological database after all.

For the record, I want to say that even though I don't agree with
these two arguments, I think it's appropriate to say that these are
good, non-straw-man arguments on the deletionist side.

1.  Article on 'eternal ephemera' make Wikipedia look ridiculous

2.  Articles on 'eternal ephemera' may make it harder to find the real
articles

I think that both of these can be answered, but that they are valid
concerns.

My essential answer is that articles on truely irrelevant topics are
not likely to be seen by very many people anyway, and that if and when
we have a problem with the search engine returning too many results,
not properly prioritized, we can start to research ranking algorithms
to ensure that well-linked mainstream articles show up first.

--Jimbo