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

Wed Sep 14 19:28:41 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.
>
> We can pretend it doesn't matter what people think of us, but if we do 
> I think we're sticking our heads in the sand.

I think this is an issue better solved by the validation project that's 
being planned for some time now.  Once we start tagging particular 
revisions of articles as checked by at least someone, we can build a 
reliable subset without deleting anything from the wider encyclopedia.  
It's also easier to keep an opt-in subset reliable than to insist on 
stemming the tide of new articles with an opt-out deletion process.

(I do agree that some articles simply should be deleted, like a lot of 
the crap that gets speedy-deleted, and even some that doesn't, but I 
don't think this is the main way to improve reliability.)

-Mark