[WikiEN-l] Proposed: stop all deletes for 6 months, then reconsider

[Erik Moeller]

I'll just register my strong objections to a deletion moratorium for the  
record. I do not see any evidence for "rampant" deletionism and think VfD  
works reasonably well (have people agreed on a threshold, 80% or something  
like that, of votes required for deletion yet?). If you want to see  
rampant deletionism, go to Everything2.com, where pages get "nuked"  
arbitrarily and anonymously. Wikipedia's process is open, based on  
consensus-forming and well-documented policies.

There are people who make even the deletion of the crappiest conceivable  
article difficult by voting to keep by default. This kind of behavior  
leads to the amassment of junk in the database, which never gets cleaned  
up because once it is gone from RC and VfD, everyone quickly forgets it.  
You might say people will eventually edit it, but in the case of the rare,  
obscure and idiosyncratic, that might very well happen years from now, if  
ever. Of course we shouldn't delete legitimate stubs, but we should remove  
articles which are in clear violation of one of our policies, be it NPOV  
or "What Wikipedia is not".

Junk will still get spidered by the search engines if a single link points  
to it, nd if people come to Wikipedia and find this stuff (like Sep. 11  
articles with tributes mixed in), it will greatly lower their opinion of  
our project (in cases that I consider "fixable", the 7 days of VfD are a  
nice ultimatum for doing so). Remember that most of our new users come  
from the search engines.

I am somewhat disturbed by Wikipedia 1.0 being used as an argument not to  
keep the working Wikipedia clean of junk. Both serve the same purpose. The  
goal for Wikipedia 1.0 (a limited subset for distribution) is to filter  
out the kind of stuff that is hard to verify, too obscure, offensive etc.,  
but that would go through VfD unscathed.

Given the large majority support needed for deletion, I do not think that  
any kind of out-of-control deletion is to be expected. If you are the kind  
of person who thinks a "List of heterosexuals" might be useful, then you  
might feel that Wikipedia is somehow oppressing you, but if you want to  
build an encyclopedia, it is unlikely that you will.

The whole idea to label one faction of Wikipedia as "deletionists" and  
another as "inclusionists" is bogus. This only makes it more difficult for  
people to reflect their own decisions and contributes to herd-like  
behavior. With very few exceptions, everyone accepts that some cleaning up  
is needed. We just need to agree on when to delete and what to remove,  
which is best done by improving, newly implementing and pointing to policy  
pages.

Regards,

Erik