Now, watch people 'delete' my comment by downvoting, without giving me any counterargument.
> Honestly, I cannot think of a good reason to delete any article at all, unless it's obviously fraudulent, marketing-oriented, illegal, or obscene according to a widely accepted definition of obscenity.
None of these are objective, though, meaning this argument will never end. In particular, there is no 'widely accepted definition of obscenity' even within any particular country, let alone the entire English-speaking world (assuming you only care about the English-language Wikipedia).
> The argument that it would be too difficult to maintain lots of extra articles is also weak, because not every article needs to be regularly edited, and more articles on niche topics might actually attract more editors.
There's the danger of the more out-of-the-way articles becoming spam-traps. The technical solutions would stifle article creation and modification, which seems directly counter to your goals.
> No, we won't end up with a page for every John Doe and his cat.
Why not? How is not having a page for every John Doe and his cat not simply deletionism?
> In fact, it's possible that people with certain psychological traits self-select for Wikipedia editorship.
Non sequitur based on psychological projection or other such nonsense. You have no real basis for this statement.
That's a very broad definition of deletionism, and I'm not interested in arguing about terminology. (Hey, I don't want any wedding gown photos on my hard drive. Am I a deletionist too?) Besides, distinguishing between private desire/preference and public editorial behavior is exactly what I'm trying to advocate here.
> None of these are objective, though, meaning this argument will never end.
Objectivity is not black and white. Some rules are easier to enforce fairly than others, and some rules are more subjective than others. I'm not saying that Wikipedia should officially adopt any of the rules that I listed off the top of my head, but they were meant as examples that may be less subjective than "notability". The less room a rule for deletion leaves for subjective interpretation, the better.
> There's the danger of the more out-of-the-way articles becoming spam-traps.
An article that is over 50% spam might be a good candidate for deletion. Compare this rule with "notability". Which one is more objective? Deletionists are patrolling every out-of-the-way article anyway. If they really want to contribute to Wikipedia, they should devote more energy to deleting obvious spam instead of arguing pointlessly about "notability".
> Why not? How is not having a page for every John Doe and his cat not simply deletionism?
Because not everyone gives a fuck about having his or her own Wikipedia page. Just like not everyone wants to have a public Facebook wall. Lack of interest is a powerful resource that modern societies should learn to leverage to the benefit of all. If the page doesn't get created in the first place, there is nothing to delete. You can call this deletionism too, but then we're back to arguing about terminology.
> Non sequitur based on psychological projection or other such nonsense.
Maybe it is, but so is your so-called criticism. (Yes, that's tu quoque.)
Wikipedia has long adopted those of your rules that are workable and discussed all of them at great length. None of the rules you propose is any use as an alternative to notability criteria. None of the rules you propose is simple to apply in the real world.
Notability is a technical term on Wikipedia. It's a mistake to interpret it as the common English word or concept. It's also not all that subjective: When defined for all possible articles, notability is necessarily extremely abstract. However, notability is being refined and re-interpreted for specific areas in a community process. I'm not always happy about this process, and I certainly don't agree with its results in all cases, but that's a different issue.
It's this process that matters. There has to be some process to determine whether an article gets included (though extreme inclusionists may disagree). For this process, Wikipedia:Notability is the constitutional law, the individual Wikiprojects' notability criteria are the law derived from the constitution, both of which are applied to specific instances, in a system with a rich body of case law and with various bodies for arbitration.
In a way, it's more useful to think about notability not as an attribute of an entity, but simply as a short verdict of the current process. In other words, a thing is not notable enough to get its own Wikipedia article, but rather the fact that it got included and remained included makes it notable according to the technical meaning of Wikipedia.
Of course this is complicated and of course there are horrible downsides of having such a complicated system. Maybe we should just opt for a simpler system and resign to the fact that the end result will be worse. However I doubt that people would herald the new inclusionist Wikipedia where everyone's dad can get an article, instead they'd mercilessly pounce on the new Wikipedia full of spam, self-advertising, non-referenced, non-verified, non-sensical and attack articles.
I understand that notability is not a simple rule but the result of countless debates and arbitrations that resemble a system of common law. Still, I think it is very unfortunate that a new contributor often needs to win an argument with a deletionist as soon as he writes a new article for the first time. That's like requiring every new business to win a nasty lawsuit (or jump through similarly onerous hoops) before they can actually sell anything. The result of the former is a precipitous drop in the number of new contributors and the further consolidation of editorial power in the hands of existing contributors. The result of the latter, which we often see in markets with government-approved quasi-monopolies like health-care supplies and payment processing, is stifled innovation.
> Maybe we should just opt for a simpler system and resign to the fact that the end result will be worse.
How do you know that the result will be worse? What do you even mean by worse? One of the symptoms of an unhealthy monopoly is that the established powers refuse to experiment, lest they lose their dominant position. Attempts to depart from the status quo are met with alarmism and doomsday scenarios, and existing rules and procedures get romanticized to absurd ends. When a community is ailing, its cherished processes should be the first to be questioned. Deletionists might have had a noble purpose when they began their crusade a few years ago, but now that they wield an enormous amount of power over other contributors, I cannot think of them except as part of a self-perpetuating unhealthy monopoly over editorial power.
Rules like "Thou shalt not put up ads here" and "Thou shalt use proper citations", even if no less complicated to apply in the real world, at least articulate clear ideals that people can understand, and provide concrete guidelines that new contributors can follow. The less abstract the rules are, the less room there is for abuse.
Sorry, I guess that was badly put. I wasn't discussing any specific change/simplification of the system and saying that this would make things worse. Without some specific changes at hand it's difficult/meaningless to make such predictions. I certainly don't think that the current process is optimal and any change is a change for the worse. Personally, I'd be happier with drastically relaxed notability criteria.
I meant that if there was a change that involved a trade-off between process complexity and article quality[0], we shouldn't tend towards article quality at all costs. I meant that maybe a lower article quality is worth it if it means being less byzantine, less harsh towards the newbies, more flexible, etc.
Of course if you can avoid that trade-off, if Wikipedia can be any or all of these things without a drop in quality -- and I'm sure it can be although I don't know how -- that's even better and we should implement that first.
[0] You're 100% correct that "worse" isn't well defined here, and "high article quality" is not much better.
This is frustrating. I can't tell if you're making a joke, in which case I understand fine and I was going to make a joke about tautologies myself but then changed my mind. But if you're not making a joke and you think this involves circular reasoning, then you completely missed my point:
Notability, the Wikipedia term, is not an input to the article inclusion/exclusion process, it is the output of this process. The process itself depends on the topic and relies on various proxy metrics because notability (the English word) relates to an abstract concept which you can not meaningfully discuss directly.
As far as whether I was making a joke or not, it is a bit of both. I understand that the wikipedia definition of the term notable means something that has been decided to be included in the encyclopedia, however in discussions over whether articles should be deleted, I have noticed that it seems very common for wikipedia members to give notability as the reason for deletion, which if notability merely means whether something has been decided to be suitable for the encylopedia, is then circular reasoning.
They use it as a proxy for the notability criteria laid out in [0] and the various more concrete notability criteria for various genres. I think that's all right. But it often comes down to people subjectively feeling one way or another about an article's notability and then applying the rules in a way that delivers the desired outcome.
Excellent post. I have no idea why you were downvoted. As usual, people discussing Wikipedia policy are doomed to rehash arguments long made on Wikipedia meta pages... poorly.
I'm a moderate inclusionist (or I was, years ago when I was active on Wikipedia), but the quality of the inclusionist arguments outside of Wikipedia itself is pathetic. I think this is because there are almost no deletionists outside of Wikipedia which elevate the discussion with good counter-arguments.
> the quality of the inclusionist arguments outside of Wikipedia itself is pathetic.
I'd be interested in reading some of the "good" deletionist & inclusionist arguments inside Wikipedia that you mention. These pages [1][2][3] seem to summarize most of the well-known arguments from both sides, but each of the points listed there are too schematic for a casual reader to make sense of what's actually going on within the community. Besides, some of the arguments there actually look even more pathetic than anything I've read outside of Wikipedia. (What the hell does Roe v. Wade have to do with this?)
> people discussing Wikipedia policy are doomed to rehash arguments long made on Wikipedia meta pages... poorly.
Members of some communities seem to think that outsiders are not fully qualified to participate in debates about their beloved policies. But often a detached outsider's perspective is exactly what is needed to fix a broken status quo.
For example, both the deletionist and inclusionist "Associations" are made up of experienced editors with strong commitments pro and con. These folks might not be in the best position to talk about the many hurdles that new contributors face every day, which has more to do with maldistributed burdens of proof and the lack of clearly articulated standards.
Well-intentioned new contributors don't care whether Wikipedia should be paper or toilet paper. They care when some editor on a power trip spends 30 minutes arguing to delete a little article when he could have spent a much more productive 3 minutes looking up a couple of references that the newbie didn't know how to include.
Sorry, I don't have any good links for you. It's been a while since I've been active, and most of what I'm thinking of is spread around hundreds of AfD (deletion review), article talk pages and policy pages. Much of the discussion within Wikipedia isn't all that great, either, with a very low SNR. I'm not sure that there's a single page which only covers the really good arguments of either side.
The quotes & arguments in the articles you reference are cringe-worthy, but then again I don't think they're very serious. I think the "Rationale for deletionism" section in your [1] is pretty okay, and something every inclusionist had better keep in mind when making a policy suggestion. As usual, it pays to know the opposing side's arguments very well.
I'm not sure that a detached outsider is in a better position to come up with what's needed to fix the system, being ignorant of both what the system is and why it was set up in this way. At least the latter is required before coming up with a new, improved system.
Newbies are good judges on the difficulty of entry into Wikipedia, but that's an orthogonal issue: it may be possible to be nicer to newbies AND have sensible notability criteria/high quality articles, but then again, maybe not. If not, as I said earlier, having less sensible notability criteria and worse quality articles may be worth it if it resulted in a less hostile environment/image.
> I'm not sure that a detached outsider is in a better position to come up with what's needed to fix the system, being ignorant of both what the system is and why it was set up in this way. At least the latter is required before coming up with a new, improved system.
I guess I didn't express my "detached outsider" argument very clearly. I wasn't trying to suggest that outsiders should dictate specific policies of Wikipedia's editorial process. That task should be left to those who actually know the community well. But formulating specific policies is not all there is to policy-making. Policy-making also involves philosophizing about general principles, such as "What kind of website do we want/need Wikipedia to be?" This is the area where deletionists and inclusionists seem to disagree the most sharply, and since debates in this area seem to have been in a stalemate for quite a while, this is the area where I think fresh perspectives are needed the most. It is also the area where one can make valuable points without having to have been a Wikipedia contributor for 5+ years.
If you interpret pg's suggestion as "You have plenty of space," then of course he's just rehashing the paper vs. toilet paper debate. But IMO the core of his suggestion is "There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica," i.e. radically more inclusive, more dynamic, more egalitarian, more accessible, etc. This is a matter of general principles and ideals, not specific policies. pg didn't suggest specific policies as an alternative to the current way that deletions are handled. Rather, he invited Wikipedians to step beyond internal politics and think more deeply about what role they want Wikipedia to play in the context of broader social changes. To call his argument "pathetic" merely on the basis of the "You have plenty of space" interpretation is to see the tree but miss the forest. Sometimes, forests contain dead trees. But that doesn't mean that the forest itself is worthless. To take pg's suggestion as a simple rehashing of old arguments among Wikipedians is to drag him down to the level of myopic nitpicking that much of the debate surrounding deletionism seems to have become of late.
The suggestions I made in my original comment do lend themselves too easily to the "You have plenty of space" interpretation, and I'm sorry that I couldn't express myself more effectively. I also learned a lot from the replies I got. I can't edit that comment anymore, but if I could, I might remove all those specific arguments and just focus on the maldistribution of burdens of proof. Because that's the kind of philosophical principle that seems to be lacking in all the nitpicking about unverifiable predictions pro and con. If Wikipedians can't bring themselves to stop obsessing about internal politics and reconsider what their philosophical commitments imply, at least I hope they're humble enough to admit that an outsider might have more interesting things to say about matters of general principle. A community that is all too ready to discount outsider perspectives is a sure sign of an ailing community that is trying to insulate its existing power relations even more from rational scrutiny.
> more inclusive, more dynamic, more egalitarian, more accessible
more spammy, more full of nonsense written by homeopaths and similar nutballs, more full of hateful crap written by Neo-Nazis and their ilk, etc. etc.
If you opt for the radically inclusionist policy, you no longer have much of a justification for deleting that page that says cancer can be cured by chugging bleach and shoving silver up your rectum. It's wrong, sure, but deleting it would be a tad... deletionist.
> you no longer have much of a justification for deleting that page that says cancer can be cured by chugging bleach and shoving silver up your rectum.
So what? Just add another paragraph to that page explaining the scientific consensus that anally penetrating yourself with silver won't cure cancer. (Believe it or not, Wikipedia actually has a rule requiring balanced coverage.)
You might even vote to move that entire section to a page of its own. (Does that also count as deletionism in your dictionary? What about article-splittism?)
Either response will take a lot less time and effort for everyone involved, compared to starting a heated and confrontational debate about deleting an entire article.
"If there be time to expose through discussion falsehood and fallacies, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." -- Justice Louis Brandeis, Whitney v. California (1927)
> Just add another paragraph to that page explaining the scientific consensus that anally penetrating yourself with silver won't cure cancer.
So you have multiple articles on the subject of cancer treatment, all repeating the same information and all needing to be updated one by one? Because my point was what Wikipedia now calls a 'POV Fork', or a new article explicitly created to push a specific POV as opposed to being NPOV.
Also, you're hitting up against something that inclusionists also complain about: Their pet POV Forks, the articles they demand to be allowed to own, keep getting deleted because Wikipedia already has NPOV coverage of that topic! Shame and infamy! Shame! And! Infamy!
> You might even vote to move that entire section to a page of its own.
I think that's pretty much the definition of a POV Fork, unless I misunderstand you.
> Either response will take a lot less time and effort for everyone involved
Not if you want all the articles on a given subject to be intelligent, factual, and balanced. Then you have to turn each and every (attempted) POV Fork into an NPOV article that's a clone of the article it forked off from.
You may recognize gwern from comments here at hackernews, and after reading it I didn't feel that I'd wasted my time (which should be read as mild praise relative to a typical submission to hackernews).
Now, watch people 'delete' my comment by downvoting, without giving me any counterargument.
> Honestly, I cannot think of a good reason to delete any article at all, unless it's obviously fraudulent, marketing-oriented, illegal, or obscene according to a widely accepted definition of obscenity.
None of these are objective, though, meaning this argument will never end. In particular, there is no 'widely accepted definition of obscenity' even within any particular country, let alone the entire English-speaking world (assuming you only care about the English-language Wikipedia).
> The argument that it would be too difficult to maintain lots of extra articles is also weak, because not every article needs to be regularly edited, and more articles on niche topics might actually attract more editors.
There's the danger of the more out-of-the-way articles becoming spam-traps. The technical solutions would stifle article creation and modification, which seems directly counter to your goals.
> No, we won't end up with a page for every John Doe and his cat.
Why not? How is not having a page for every John Doe and his cat not simply deletionism?
> In fact, it's possible that people with certain psychological traits self-select for Wikipedia editorship.
Non sequitur based on psychological projection or other such nonsense. You have no real basis for this statement.