[WikiEN-l] The deletion paradox

Tue Jan 31 01:53:40 UTC 2006

Steve Bennett wrote:

>1) Wikipedia has nearly a million articles. A very large number of
>them are crap. The more articles we delete, the better.
>  
>
I don't think this assertion is true.  There do exist articles that are 
not useful in the least, but the vast majority of stubs are useful 
starting points for a later expansion of the article.

A better solution is to better mark what is what, which is basically the 
long-discussed sifter project.  A 2-sentence stub with no references 
that nobody except the original author has read is at a low level of 
trust.  A well-developed article with many references that many people 
have worked on has a high likelihood of being accurate.  There can be 
gradations in between, and of course all this only applies to particular 
versions.

There's no reason to *delete* a 2-sentence unverified stub, merely to 
make clear to our readers that it is in fact a 2-sentence unverified 
stub, and so ought to be read accordingly.  Of course, an intelligent 
reader already ought to be able to recognize that for themselves, but we 
can help the rest along.

-Mark