[WikiEN-l] Partial solution to rampant deletionism

Sat Nov 8 00:02:29 UTC 2003

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Tell you what: when someone shows up and starts _hand_ writing
>thousands of articles on random topics, we'll deal with it.  If they
>refuse to stop doing it, we might even decide to ban them.
>
>But until someone actually does that, I don't even see why we should
>talk about it.
>
>You're making the argument that since someday, some lonely person
>might have enough freetime to waste typing in thousands and thousands
>of entries in the manner of a robot, we have to delete any and every
>article that's too trivial today.
>
>I think that are some missing steps in that deduction, so that the
>conclusion does not follow from the premises.
>  
>
Ah, but it has happened: a group of people have decided to add literally 
hundreds of pages on victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.  My worry is that 
if we allow this, there is nothing to stop literally millions of other 
pages from being eventually added.  There are, for example, quite a few 
groups interested in preserving the memories of those who died in the 
Holocaust; I don't consider it unlikely that at some point some of them 
will discover Wikipedia and begin a concerted effort to add at least 
thousands of biographies of people who have nothing particularly notable 
except "died in the Holocaust" filled with perhaps paragraphs of detail 
of exactly where they were born, place of death, etc.  If we allow this 
sort of thing to go on for Sept. 11, we have no good reason to protest 
when it starts happening for other tragedies in which lots of people 
died--and it _will_ happen, especially as Wikipedia gets more high-profile.

My downplaying of the bot/person distinction is that, in the case of a 
group of people concertedly adding articles, it already functions 
essentially like a bot in that the rest of us cannot keep up with them 
and fix them as they come in.  This is already plainly visible with the 
Sept. 11 entries, as [[Antonio Alvarado]], an all-caps eulogy still not 
fixed after 18 months, aptly illustrates.  It'd be even more obvious if 
there were a group of, say, 100 people adding Holocaust biographies; I 
don't think that'd be any better than a bot doing it, and potentially 
worse (as the formatting and article quality would be less consistent).

-Mark