Deletionism is the reason Wikipedia has only a moderate shortage of editors curating content, rather than an utterly insoluble maintenance nightmare. If this farce means the inclusionists are winning, it's the beginning of the end for Wikipedia. They will get what they seem to want—a mirror of the entire web hosted at wikipedia.org, with just as much outdated, useless, and actively misleading crap.
Rather than a "moderate shortage of editors curating content," the Wikimedia Foundation says that the decline in the number of active administrators is "continuing in an unsustainable fashion."
It would be interesting to look at administrators' self-reported reasons for burning out, and it is definitely interesting to look at competing models for building online encyclopedias, but you may be right that an explicitly more inclusionist policy (which allows even more content that cannot be reliably sourced and that may be simply made up by fanboys) would hasten the decline of active Wikipedia administrators and editors in general. On the whole, I have an inclusionist orientation, and still do, but after seeing many more Wikipedia articles from the inside (as a wikipedian) than I once had, I can't say that I disagree with the majority of article deletion decisions that are actually made by current Wikipedia community processes.
I can say definitively that I know of at least a dozen people who would otherwise be active contributors to wikipedia if they hadn't had dozens of hours of their work deleted repeatedly.
What kind of sources did they cite in their contributions?
(I agree with you, assuming those articles were sourced, that it is appalling to delete sourced content. But that has happened to me. Point-of-view pushing is a huge problem on Wikipedia. Coming with sources, in my observation, saves articles from being deleted entirely, but having good sources doesn't save a paragraph from being deleted entirely in an article devoted to pushing a point of view.)
I guess that's part of the debate isn't it? Most things don't actually have a tremendous number of academic sources. If I'm fantastically interested in contributing an article about say, a well known jazz band that doesn't have a page on wikipedia, I may be terribly limited in what secondary resources I can call upon.
Jazz bands don't get a terrible amount of coverage in main stream media, they don't become top-40 acts, they don't get academic papers written about them in the ACM, etc. But they may be hugely influential, have tens of thousands of listeners, and may have other qualifications for why they should have a page. But if they don't meet <arbitrary person>'s requirement for notability they may flag it AfD and then it ends up working it's way through Wikipedia's impressively broken editing process where it'll probably end up deleted despite any discussion to the contrary.
Importantly, my hypothetical jazz band may only be well known in Jazz circles, having never pierced more mainstream circles. But just like a singular academic paper that no lay person has heard about, but been cited hundreds of times, this band may have influenced hundreds of other, highly visible bands.
I'm picking Jazz here, but it could be any other fairly insular sub-culture, say Blue Grass, or Model Train collectors. It's not up to me, as somebody not interested in their sub-culture to decide if it's notable. That only tests whether or not something has percolated up to "common knowledge". If that's the test for inclusion, then we don't really need Wikipedia anyway do we? Everybody already knows what's in it!
Deletionism is also one of the major reasons that I only contribute to the Hackety Hack and Shoes articles on Wikipedia, and nothing else. (oh, and I fear the day when I have to try to prove Hackety Hack 'notable.' I'm pretty sure that it isn't by the letter of the law.)
They'd have more help if they didn't go around deleting things.
Same here. I'd be a lot more active in editing Wikipedia if it weren't for the f@#!#ng deletionists. But as long as those pikers are running around deleting stuff left and right, I feel very little motivation to get involved on a regular basis.
With the current model there needs to be some line because editors are a finite resource and people do occasionally deface articles etc. I would suggest having Wikipedia’s deleted articles end up on another website (using the same backend) which is then ignored by the editorial community to avoid annoying people.
PS: There are already plenty of other wiki's with different focus. There is little need for ex: naruto.wikia.com content on en.wikipedia.com.
The notability guidelines don't address this at all. If the article about AliceML got defaced, the people who obviously care about it would fix it.
And if nobody cares about the article, why does it matter if it's been defaced? And why not delete it once it's been defaced, rather than pre-emptively?
AliceML is an edge case where arguments can be made on both sides (I would have kept it). However the rule is more setup to avoid people adding their family tree and favorite recopies to Wikipedia etc resulting in 10 billion articles and no way to manage them. Overall I think it's a fairly loose standard ex:(Random article) gave me
I can see keeping the first and possibly the second, but why not delete the third?
PS: A different option might be to build a custom AI to validate things, but for now balancing Notable around the size of the community seems reasonable.
Heh, I see it as more of an organizational issue, but I suggested a UI solution. Wikipedia is a moderated wiki that seems un-moderated to most users. The Notability rules bother people, but they are really part of a larger tradeoff and scrapping them is risky.
One of the powerful features of wikipedia vs. topic specific wikis is the ability to spend literally hours bouncing around seemingly disconnected subjects, learning something new at each new node. You can start at Naruto and end up at African tribal weapons in a sequence of incredibly smooth segues that can consume literally hours of time. Almost everybody who does this describes the experience as "pleasant" or "amazing" and all come away having learned something.
A walled off wiki simply doesn't allow this type of holistic discovery. And in many cases, the boundaries between subjects can seem rather arbitrary and fuzzy. Where does Naruto end and Feudal Japan start?
If the issue is with maintenance and proper curation of content then that is what should be discussed.
I'd far prefer in the case that an article is not well maintained that it be flagged for deletion in X months due to absence of proper care. If there is a strong community presence the article can be resurrected and recovered and Wikipedia ultimately improved and only otherwise the article deleted.
I've seen deletionism creep into articles that were very well written, very well cited and overall a great source of information. I hope you are either generalizing or I'm misunderstanding your point as otherwise this does anything but justify deletionism.
>I've seen deletionism creep into articles that were very well written, very well cited and overall a great source of information.
These characteristics are not the measure used for inclusion. Which is absolutely right IMO - one could create a well written article, well cited and be the best source on what hair products some actor uses but it wouldn't make that information more notable.
I think that maintaining as high a quality as possible is important for Wikipedia. Like someone said, making Wikipedia a mirror of the web is not beneficial.
Someone here could probably do all right by making a mirror of all pages being deleted though¹.
