[WikiEN-l] What Readers Say on Inclusion

Mon Oct 3 15:02:29 UTC 2005

I just did a very informal poll among friends I have who do not edit  
Wikipedia, but who read it, on the matter of when an article should  
be deleted.

I did not express my own opinion to any of them and solicit  
agreement. So the fact that they are my friends so, naturally, they  
agree with me doesn't play into this. On the other hand, the  
possibility that I am naturally prone to talking to people who  
basically agree with me, even on issues we haven't discussed, might.

In any case - no one I talked to mentioned notability as a reason to  
delete. All of them, upon being specifically asked about notability,  
generally took a "whatever" approach to it, with several specifically  
saying, "No, if the article isn't lies, it should definitely be  
included no matter how trivial the topic." Other views included "If  
the topic is mentioned in another article, and that mention wasn't  
created specifically to make an excuse to have an article, it should  
be included" (The closest thing to a deletionist position I got) and  
"If someone cares enough to create it, it should probably not be  
deleted, even though that someone might be being an idiot."

Which doesn't prove anything, I'll be the first to admit. But I think  
this is an important thing we haven't been asking - what do readers  
think. Most of the people expressing their opinions on this inclusion/ 
exclusion debate are editors. Most of us, in fact, are very jaded  
editors. And we are an incredible minority among the people who load  
en.wikipedia.org every day. And we should bear that in mind - because  
after a bit of talking to readers, I think people really do want us  
to try to be a place where you can find any piece of knowledge or  
fact. To a degree, actually, that's even beyond what I think is  
important to achieve (Although I still would rather leave in garage  
bands than exclude notable but obscure topics, and I still don't care  
enough to delete garage bands myself).

-Snowspinner