Todd Allen wrote:
Cruft. Disorganization. Lack of context. If we're
to be writing an
-encyclopedia-, it needs to have certain standards. We don't for example
cover every living person in the world, because the vast majority of
them are not notable. Let Myspace do that. Similarly, let All Music
Guide cover the two-bit bands and
tv.com cover every episode of every
show. We're supposed to be distilling, not replicating.
So why do we bother having articles about topics that Britannica's
already thoroughly covered, then? Why do we allow stubs to exist if
"disorganized" and "lacking context" are valid reasons for summary
deletion?
Also, I should point out that in many of the cases that I've checked
where articles were removed our coverage is _better_ than
TV.com. Better
both in terms of detail and presentation, and better in terms of license
(if TV.com's under any sort of free licence I can't find it in that
cluttered mess). So in some cases the removal of these articles is
removing the best source of information about those shows that you can
readily find _anywhere_ on the Internet.
And before you take that as an opening to cry "OR!", bear in mind that
one can take multiple sub-par sources and combine them into something
that's greater than any one source individually.