[WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

Sat Oct 25 04:57:11 UTC 2003

Delirium wrote:

> 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. 

Hooray!!! We're getting somewhere!
Nobody seriously objected when the entire text of "Origin of Species", 
"Macbeth" and the Oregon State Constitution were deleted.

> 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. 

My inclination with the long example-title would be to create a 
reasonable place to redirect, change all the links that lead there to 
the new title, wait for a month, then quietly delete the long-titled 
article.  A lot of other lists would be better served by consolidation.

A very few lists seem to generate heat well beyond their merit.  The 
List of heterosexuals has been like that.  It's become a lightning rod. 
 Geting rid of that one will just send the lightning elsewhere. 
 Occasionally threatening to delete it (without actually doing so) keeps 
the attention of its proponents focused where they can be relatively 
harmless. :-)

As for lists generally, I think that they have a peculiar fascination 
for people.  I suspect that it is just as strong for Wikipedia readers 
as for writers.  I don't know whether there have ever been any 
psychological studies on this kind of thing, nor do I know how we might 
go about designing an experiment to scientifically test this hypothesis.

> 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. 

That "other 20%" is a big grab-bag.  I tend to give the writer the 
benefit of the doubt, and to look at these on a case by case basis with 
many different possibilities.  If an orphan article with no redeeming 
value was contributed by an anonymous user and nothing has happened to 
it for a month no one will notice if it's quietly deleted.

Ec

>