John Lee wrote:
4. Articles
about "non-notable" stuff does not hurt Wikipedia. Since
noone cares about the stuff, noone will link to it and noone will
search for it and NOONE will ever see it!
A keyword search can easily bring up non-notable articles. When somebody
sees an entry resembling a blog posting, what will they think of Wikipedia?
They will think "Whee! There's stuff to improve!" and become a contributor.
If it's a notable article, it will be improved
anyway.
An article goes through VfD for how long? 5 days? 7 days? Hardly enough
to give people time to improve a bad article on an obscure topic.
Honestly, if I had to pick between deleting a
(hypothetical) article on Ronald Reagan which is full of unrelated
nonsense about doing drugs or keeping it in the hopes somebody would
improve it, I'd do the former without skipping a beat.
Of course, that is an extreme example. How about Anthere's recent example:
The '''medlar''' is a [[fruit]].
Admittedly, this article is:
* short
* incomplete
However, it is also:
* factually accurate
* NPOV
* actually something I didn't know!
Hence, it is useful.
Having an article only gives the impression to readers
that we tolerate junk.
Which is good. If we give the impression to readers that we tolerate
only full-grown complete articles, we will detract contributors who are
perhaps not quite as good a writer as they would like to be.
I'd rather
receive complaints from readers that we don't have an article on Ronald
Reagan than complaints that our article of Ronald Reagan is useless,
which in turn will lead to questioning the credibility of other innocent
articles.
The missing of an article on Ronald Reagan would similarly lead to
questioning the completeness of other innocent articles.
Now, please don't get me wrong; I am not a complete inclusionist,
either. For example, I too don't think it would make sense to have a
separate article on every single school anyone ever went to. However, I
have been wanting to contribute to advanced topics in Computation Theory
and Complexity Theory, but have been a bit hesitant to do so because
some of the things I want to write about would start out as simple stubs
and risk being deleted.
Timwi