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

Sat Nov 8 22:08:05 UTC 2003

>Erik wrote
>
>I'll just register my strong objections to a deletion moratorium for the
>record. I do not see any evidence for "rampant" deletionism and think VfD
>works reasonably well (have people agreed on a threshold, 80% or something
>like that, of votes required for deletion yet?). If you want to see
>rampant deletionism, go to Everything2.com, where pages get "nuked"
>arbitrarily and anonymously. Wikipedia's process is open, based on
>consensus-forming and well-documented policies.
>
>There are people who make even the deletion of the crappiest conceivable
>article difficult by voting to keep by default. This kind of behavior
>leads to the amassment of junk in the database, which never gets cleaned
>up because once it is gone from RC and VfD, everyone quickly forgets it.
>You might say people will eventually edit it, but in the case of the rare,
>obscure and idiosyncratic, that might very well happen years from now, if
>ever. Of course we shouldn't delete legitimate stubs, but we should remove
>articles which are in clear violation of one of our policies, be it NPOV
>or "What Wikipedia is not".
>
>Junk will still get spidered by the search engines if a single link points
>to it, nd if people come to Wikipedia and find this stuff (like Sep. 11
>articles with tributes mixed in), it will greatly lower their opinion of
>our project (in cases that I consider "fixable", the 7 days of VfD are a
>nice ultimatum for doing so). Remember that most of our new users come
>from the search engines.
>
>I am somewhat disturbed by Wikipedia 1.0 being used as an argument not to
>keep the working Wikipedia clean of junk. Both serve the same purpose. The
>goal for Wikipedia 1.0 (a limited subset for distribution) is to filter
>out the kind of stuff that is hard to verify, too obscure, offensive etc.,
>but that would go through VfD unscathed.
>
>Given the large majority support needed for deletion, I do not think that
>any kind of out-of-control deletion is to be expected. If you are the kind
>of person who thinks a "List of heterosexuals" might be useful, then you
>might feel that Wikipedia is somehow oppressing you, but if you want to
>build an encyclopedia, it is unlikely that you will.
>
>The whole idea to label one faction of Wikipedia as "deletionists" and
>another as "inclusionists" is bogus. This only makes it more difficult for
>people to reflect their own decisions and contributes to herd-like
>behavior. With very few exceptions, everyone accepts that some cleaning up
>is needed. We just need to agree on when to delete and what to remove,
>which is best done by improving, newly implementing and pointing to policy
>pages.

I agree 100% with Erik.  This proposal is absurd in the extreme. Wikipedia 
finds it hard enough to keep up with the deletion of articles continually. A 
ban for six months would leave a back log of hundreds if not thousands of 
articles that have no place on an encyclopedia but end up surviving by 
default, or else leading to a /massive/ period of deletions unprecedented in 
wikipedia history. It is quite frankly the most ludicrous of ludicrous 
ideas, an unworkable idea that would damage wikipedia. The ''deletionists'' 
against ''inclusionists'' argument is utterly bogus. It is a case of those 
who take the idea that wikipedia as an encyclopedia seriously and basic 
standards below which an article is deleted and those who see wikipedia as 
some sort of scribblebox where any sort of rubbish, not matter how bad, has 
a 'right' to be left undisturbed.

JT

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