[WikiEN-l] Re: The heart of the deletion problem

Mon Dec 12 01:45:24 UTC 2005

Snowspinner wrote:

> The heart of the problem with AfD, DRV, and the rest of the deletion  
> suite of pages is this: It is increasingly a pile of rules. Rules  
> encourage playing to win.

This is one effect of the problem with deletion, yes. At its root, 
however, the problem with deletion is merely a manifestation of more 
fundamental issues. In fact, it has a lot in common with the other major 
problem that has been so prominently in the news for the past couple weeks.

The real heart of the problem is that people are laboring under the 
misapprehension that they're looking at or working on something like a 
final version of the encyclopedia. So they get themselves in a 
lather/snit/tizzy (pick your idiom) over a transient state of affairs, 
or they try to force permanence where consensus for it is lacking. 
Disputed deletions are in the latter category.

And it's very easy to give people the wrong idea when we don't have a 
final or even a stable version of anything. Considering that Wikipedia 
has been going for five years, I think we're ready to start. Stable 
versions, even more than article ratings, are a feature we need. In 
fact, I think setting up article ratings before stable versions is 
completely backwards, because it's the stable versions we should be 
asking people to rate.

Stable versions that feed into development versions, with the latter 
clearly identified as such (in David Gerard's words, 1995-style yellow 
and black "Under Construction" GIFs), would do quite a bit to defuse 
these problems, I think. In particular, I don't think the urge to delete 
would be nearly as strong, and the concern about harm to Wikipedia's 
image from be minimized. The time to provide stable versions has come.

--Michael Snow