[WikiEN-l] Why changing the deletion process is a bad idea

Wed Sep 14 18:16:27 UTC 2005

JAY JG wrote:

>
> One of Wikipedia's biggest issues has always been getting taken 
> seriously as an encyclopedia, or being accepted by educators as a 
> reliable (or even acceptable) source.  Credibility is also the thing 
> other encyclopedias (i.e. Britannica) harp on.  Credibility also 
> brings donations and other kinds of support and funding.

Hmm, I'd think if we weren't being taken seriously as a reference work,
the servers wouldn't be getting slowly crushed under the ever-growing
weight of readers...

At WP's current size, the chances of finding a random vanity article is
minuscule - in fact, the critiques of WP's credibility by outside people
have been based on points of factual detail in existing articles on
familiar subjects, not on whether an "unencyclopedic" article exists or
not (which shouldn't be too surprising, since no one will go looking for
them in the first place).

Note that I'm not opposed to scrubbing out borderline material, I just
don't see a red-alert-the-encyclopedia-is-decaying-right-before-our-eyes
situation that requires instant reaction. Our credibility is much more
dependent on accuracy and completeness of the high-visibility articles,
and energy spent on the marginal is energy taken away from the important.

Stan