[WikiEN-l] Dartmouth follies

Wed Aug 25 21:16:00 UTC 2004

Andrew Lih wrote:

>Stan, I tend to agree there is a (perhaps misplaced) sense of urgency
>about having to "mop up" quickly, list things on VfD, etc. Some of it
>might be arrogance or nastiness.
>
>But I'd like to offer another interpretation - there is no confidence
>these suspicious edits will be found or caught later. And that can bug
>certain types of people. Of all the mechanisms Wikipedia has for
>tracking changes and edits, perhaps the weakest is how to allow new
>entires to linger for a specified period and grow, and then come back
>to evaluate later. For many, "check it later" means "check it never."
>
>I guess this could be cast as a finer grain interpretation of
>inclusionism and deletionism.
>
>Absolute inclusionist - any and everything should be in Wikipedia
>Optimistic inclusionist - maybe not good now, but it may be, keep and
>check back later
>Pessimistic deletionist - may be good sometime, but delete it now, and
>keep only when good
>Absolute deletionist - it's not "encyclopediac", get rid of it
>
In that spectrum I would classify myself as "optimistic inclusionist". 

Beyond the universally recognized vandalism which I would delete 
immediately most of this stuff is harmless.  Those who feel strongly 
that something needs to be deleted should develop their own mechanisms 
for tracking it (perhaps on a sub-page of their own user page)  If the 
material becomes lost and nobody notices it for a year or more, so 
what?  In a database of 500,000 items it's not taking up a lot of space, 
and the peace of mind that we earn from not having to go through yet 
another deletion argument is worth a lot more.

One really needs to examine the dynamics of deletionism.  One individual 
has a passion for reviewing new articles for what he considers 
unencyclopedic.  He finds a likely candidate and makes a VfD entry.  A 
cadre of like minded individuals who trust his judgement immediately 
respond with their votes of support.  Those of us who see some value in 
the article would need to spend a considerable amount of time reviewing 
the article before we could devise reasonable arguments for its 
retention, but we all have other priorties, and a limited amount of time 
for pursuing them.  I assure you that campus life at Dartmouth has no 
personal importance to me whatsoever.  My priorities do not include 
spending the amount of time that I would consider necessary to mount a 
proper defence of thse articles.  The number of Wikipedians to whom they 
may have enough personal importance is likely very small, certainly 
rarely enough to quicly offset the deletionists' votes.

Recently, on Wikisource, where I do follow such things someone enterred 
a scattering of Swedish daily TV schedules going back to 1969.  He seems 
to have stalled after very few.  This seems the sort of thing that could 
inspire even an ardent inclusionist to put weight on the delete button.  
I am, nevertheless, willing to be patient.  I might even be convinced to 
accept it if he can present things in a consistently informative.  In 
practical terms, I'm confident that the size of his project is well 
beyond his capacity, and that he will tire very soon.  In another month 
I may even suggest to him that this would be more beneficial if did a 
more thorough job.  I may then seek to delete it as a fragmentary and 
abandoned experiment, hopefully in a way that does not generate a lot of 
friction.

What seriously bugs me about it is that we end up with this cadre of 
passionate, and perhaps obsessive individuals running the show. 

Ec