[WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

Sat Oct 25 02:54:35 UTC 2003

Stevertigo wrote:

>Try "Cleaning up" articles instead of automatically
>"Delete" ing them.
>  
>
In general I'm fairly convinced.  I previously hadn't been familiar with 
Cleanup (it was a little bit baffling the one time I stumbled across 
it).  In the future if I come across a text dump of a treaty or 
something similar, I'll either replace with a stub, or if I don't have 
the time or inclination list on Cleanup so it doesn't get overlooked.

The main remaining problem for VfD then is things that don't belong in 
Wikipedia at all.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure if there's a 
non-antagonistic way to resolve that, since the very idea of what 
belongs in Wikipedia is a contentious issue, with a wide range of 
opinions on just how inclusive we should be.  To pick just one example 
currently on there, some people find [[List of localities in Britain 
where rare ant species had previously been recorded but are no longer 
considered to be present]] to be a useful encyclopedia article, while 
others consider the very existence of an article with such a title as 
bordering on the ludicrous.  It's not really an issue of cleaning up, 
because the people who object to its inclusion are objecting to its very 
existence, not to its current state.

Oddly I think [[List of...]] discussions are probably a good 80% of the 
contentious issues on VfD these days, so *something* needs to be done 
about that.  What, I'm not sure.  The other 20% seem to be mostly "is 
this famous or just self-aggrandizing" (cf. [[Daniel C. Boyer]], random 
webcomics, etc.), but I think we can manage to handle those if we got 
rid of all the List discussions.

-Mark