Ray Saintonge wrote:
Some people just don't get it. Most of what
Mark describes really
should be deleted, but that's not the issue. The issue is about a
demented voting system that alienates people. It's about people who
judge the work of others to be crap. If people don't get around to
fixing these articles for a while it's NO BIG DEAL. In the midst of
167,000 articles this handful is no challenge to the credibility of
Wikipedia.
I'm not that sure about that. I've actually run across non-articles
on Wikipedia before while doing research, which was rather annoying
(for example, a dump of the full text of some treaty masquerading as
an "article" on that treaty). If we didn't delete these sorts of
things, there'd be a lot more of that, which I think would hurt
Wikipedia's credibility ("250,000 articles, but only 190,000 real
ones" isn't a good tagline). When someone finds a Wikipedia article,
it should be at least a decent stub, in order to keep our reputation
for quality at least moderately high. "Oh, Wikipedia doesn't have an
article on this subject" is a lot better than "Wikipedia has an
article on this subject, let me click on that... oh, never mind, it's
not a real article, just a 155KB text dump."
But under the current Wikipedia rules, you're allowed and even
encouraged to replace that
text dump with a one-sentence stub, no questions asked, no votes
required, and almost
certainly no one objecting. It should arouse curiosity that a normal
everyday task of clearing
junk text suddenly becomes a big deal when it's a
'''DELETION''', since
the net effect is
very nearly the same.
Ironically, we even tell people not to make a big deal when reverting
vandalism,
so as not to gratify the vandals' desire for attention. How they must
enjoy the fierce
combats that erupt over VfD-listed articles! (And indeed some of the
postings on
VfD clearly indicate that articles are being created precisely to start
fights - the
trolls are now having to push their plates back before they burst at the
seams. :-) )
Stan