[WikiEN-l] Partial solution to rampant deletionism

Fri Nov 7 22:38:20 UTC 2003

"An entry is useful or it is not. It's as simple as that."

Some articles may be useful.

Some articles may be so useless that it's worth our time and energy, as
well as the risk of alienating the article's contributor, and the
inclusionists, to delete them.

On the other hand, some articles may be useless, but not so useless
that the benefit of deleting them outweighs the negatives listed above.

I used to be a deletionist, and in fact I still am, but I've moved my
deletionist stance to the eventual "1.0" version. Let's face it - the
current Wikipedia is great for compiling a large quantity of pretty good
(on average) information. It's lousy at compiling consistently very good
information. So why try? Only a more structured project will ever
accomplish the latter, so it's pointless to be perfectionist about the
current Wikipedia. We should shift our perfectionism to the "1.0"
version.

Here's another way to look at it. Some people think that the perfect
electronic encyclopedia should include every verifiable fact in the
world (let's call them the exhaustivists), while some think that it
should only include notable or important or "encyclopedic" facts (the
filterists). The nice thing about shifting our perfectionist worries
onto the "1.0" version, is that it accomodates both camps when thinking
about the current version of Wikipedia. When someone adds an article on
a non-notable topic, the exhaustivists will of course be happy, but the
filterists (like me) won't mind *too* much, because that article will
get weeded out of the great 1.0 version (we hope).

That's the only way I see out of this debate. Otherwise we'll just
never have peace between the two camps - the gap is just too wide.
(Maybe there'll be two "1.0" versions - an exhaustive version and a
filtered version.)

Alex