[WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

Sat Oct 25 02:38:22 UTC 2003

Delirium wrote:

> 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