[WikiEN-l] Partial solution to rampant deletionism

Fri Nov 7 21:04:17 UTC 2003

Delirium wrote:
> 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.

I don't think you wrote what you meant to write here.  I think that
mass-imports should be held to a higher standard than hand-written
entries.  I think I get the gist of what you were trying to say,
though.

> 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.

Tell you what: when someone shows up and starts _hand_ writing
thousands of articles on random topics, we'll deal with it.  If they
refuse to stop doing it, we might even decide to ban them.

But until someone actually does that, I don't even see why we should
talk about it.

You're making the argument that since someday, some lonely person
might have enough freetime to waste typing in thousands and thousands
of entries in the manner of a robot, we have to delete any and every
article that's too trivial today.

I think that are some missing steps in that deduction, so that the
conclusion does not follow from the premises.

--Jimbo