[WikiEN-l] Partial solution to rampant deletionism

Fri Nov 7 21:03:07 UTC 2003

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Q.  "Should I mass-import 20,000,000 census entries then?"
>A.  "Mass-importing is a different issue, which short circuits an important
>safeguard against trivia"
>  
>
I disagree with this.  There is absolutely _no_ difference between 
mass-importing thousands of articles and a person sitting down for weeks 
mass-importing thousands of articles.  The only check the latter imposes 
is "someone has to have too much free time to do this", which is not 
much of a check at all: there's all sorts of crazy things people are 
willing to spend time on that are quite trivial.  And there's all sorts 
of important things people aren't willing to spend time on.

To pick a relevant example, I'd consider any of the six million people 
who died in the Holocaust more encyclopedia-worthy than the ~3k that 
died in the WTC attacks.  The fact that there are people with enough 
spare time to mass-import the latter doesn't change this fact.

-Mark