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

Sat Nov 8 23:53:48 UTC 2003

"Alex Rosen" <arosen at novell.com> schrieb:

> - They think that an Internet encyclopedia can and should cover much
> more ground as compared to a paper encyclopedia, so more things should
> be included. It's a legitimate argument - what would Funk & Wagnalls
> include if it didn't have any space constraints?

Noone is claiming that we should not be covering more ground. The question
is how much more ground we should cover.

> - The job of the current Wikipedia is not to be a perfect encyclopedia,
> but to be a source for the great "1.0" version. That version will weed
> out everything that doesn't belong in an encyclopedia.

I'm sorry, but I'm not writing version 1.0, I am writing Wikipedia. Version 1.0 is a nice thing to have, but it is Wikipedia that I am working on, and it is Wikipedia that I want to be good.

> Until then, it's
> counterproductive to actively delete everything that's not perfect,
> because it'll drive off too many people and will cause too much argument
> and strife. (This has nothing to do with anything having a "right" to be
> left undisturbed, it's just a pragmatic thing.)

It's also counterproductive to spend time on creating and improving things
that we are going to delete later anyway. If articles should not be on Wikipedia, we should be discouraging rather than encouraging people to write them.

And nobody is claiming anything near to that we should be "deleting everything that's not perfect" anyway. Most if not all articles are 'not perfect'. There's only a small subjection of that that some of us would like to see deleted. And that's because in their opinion they are either "so bad that improving them is equivalent to starting all over" or "of such a nature that the person would be in favor of deletion even if it were perfect".

Andre Engels