[WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

Sat Oct 25 00:41:47 UTC 2003

Delirium wrote:

> While that's often true, it's also often not.  If some grad student 
> puts his resume up, what are you supposed to do with it?  Do we really 
> need a stub saying "so and so is a first-year graduate student at the 
> university of idaho; he has not yet published any papers or done any 
> noteworthy research"?  What about the case a few months ago where 
> someone was making up characters supposedly from books that as far as 
> anyone can discern don't actually exist?  Malicious or just plain 
> useless stuff like that really needs to go, and there's not much else 
> you can do with it.  And putting it on VfD is better than assuming 
> it's crap and deleting on sight, because sometimes you turn out to be 
> wrong and it actually wasn't crap, so it's nice to run it by people 
> first to make sure.
>
> As far as stubbing things goes as well, I'm not that sure it makes 
> much difference either way.  If the submission was about a legitimate 
> topic but a content-free submission, nothing's really lost by deleting 
> it.  Sure, you can undelete and stub it, but if it was content-free 
> anyway, you could just as easily stub it from scratch without 
> undeleting.  It doesn't take too much research to write two sentences 
> from scratch on most topics (a google search usually suffices).  I'd 
> personally rather just delete crap, and readd it later when someone 
> has something contentful to write about it; there's thousands of 
> potential articles to be written, so there's no reason we should be 
> forced to write a particular one right now just because someone 
> submitted nonsense with its title.  Just delete it, and write it later 
> if anyone feels like it (or write a different article instead; doesn't 
> matter much either way).
>
> The main problem I see with not deleting crap is that it won't all get 
> fixed for a while, and then the links will be blue instead of red.  
> Instead of a source text, I'd much rather have a red link.  The source 
> text adds no content (it's easy to google for), so there's no 
> advantage to having it on Wikipedia in the meantime until a real 
> article gets written, and some disadvantage.

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.

Ec