On Fri, 21 Dec 2007, David Goodman wrote:
It's not just having a complete set--though that
surely matters. (We
can have a complete set by other means too, such as combination
articles with enough information about the individual parts).
It's also about consistency--the particular items kept are not
necessarily the most important of them--our precision of deciding at
AfD is nowhere near that good, and will never be while we refuse to
recognize precedent. Lack of consistency makes us look incompetent to
do the real work of building a good encyclopedia.
You know, I could say the same about spoiler tags--spoiler tagging all
spoilers for consistency is better even if it does tag some plot sections
that you can already tell contain spoilers.
In fact, I did say that. Nobody cared.
Even more, it's about the practical operation of
WP. The work of
arguing each individual article is excessive.
I could say that about spoiler tags too.
I think this episode deletionism pretty much proves that removal of spoiler
tags--and the particular ways the system was gamed in order to do it--was far
from unique.
Of course you need to look back further than spoiler tags for this. Webcomic
deletion has a lot in common with episode deletion too. Sure, a lot of those
webcomic articles did deserve deletion, but that was simply because
indiscriminate deletion will always catch some that really deserve it.