[WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

Sat Oct 25 01:55:34 UTC 2003

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."

I do agree that the whole process should be less antagonistic, but I'm 
not too sure what to do about that.  There are some fundamental 
disagreements about what sorts of things should be in Wikipedia (for 
example, [[List of multiracial people]]), and somehow these have to be 
resolved.  I'm not sure "just don't delete any of them" is the best 
resolution (another easy one would be "delete all lists", but I don't 
think that's particularly good either--though it might not be any worse 
than "leave all lists", really).

-Mark