Delirium wrote:
While that's often true, it's also often not.
If some grad student
puts his resume up, what are you supposed to do with it? Do we really
need a stub saying "so and so is a first-year graduate student at the
university of idaho; he has not yet published any papers or done any
noteworthy research"? What about the case a few months ago where
someone was making up characters supposedly from books that as far as
anyone can discern don't actually exist? Malicious or just plain
useless stuff like that really needs to go, and there's not much else
you can do with it. And putting it on VfD is better than assuming
it's crap and deleting on sight, because sometimes you turn out to be
wrong and it actually wasn't crap, so it's nice to run it by people
first to make sure.
As far as stubbing things goes as well, I'm not that sure it makes
much difference either way. If the submission was about a legitimate
topic but a content-free submission, nothing's really lost by deleting
it. Sure, you can undelete and stub it, but if it was content-free
anyway, you could just as easily stub it from scratch without
undeleting. It doesn't take too much research to write two sentences
from scratch on most topics (a google search usually suffices). I'd
personally rather just delete crap, and readd it later when someone
has something contentful to write about it; there's thousands of
potential articles to be written, so there's no reason we should be
forced to write a particular one right now just because someone
submitted nonsense with its title. Just delete it, and write it later
if anyone feels like it (or write a different article instead; doesn't
matter much either way).
The main problem I see with not deleting crap is that it won't all get
fixed for a while, and then the links will be blue instead of red.
Instead of a source text, I'd much rather have a red link. The source
text adds no content (it's easy to google for), so there's no
advantage to having it on Wikipedia in the meantime until a real
article gets written, and some disadvantage.
Some people just don't get it. Most of what Mark describes really
should be deleted, but that's not the issue. The issue is about a
demented voting system that alienates people. It's about people who
judge the work of others to be crap. If people don't get around to
fixing these articles for a while it's NO BIG DEAL. In the midst of
167,000 articles this handful is no challenge to the credibility of
Wikipedia.
Ec