[WikiEN-l] Is Merging Worse than Deletion?

[Philip Sandifer]

A few iterations of the inclusionism/deletionism debate back, we seem  
to have settled on merging articles as a sort of happy medium.  
Increasingly, though, it seems to me that mergism and redirectionism  
is proving more destructive to our content and its growth than  
deletion was.

I'll limit myself to fiction articles, since that's where I've seen  
the worst effects, though I'd love to hear from people who edit in  
other areas. [[List of characters in Gilmore Girls]] was the target of  
a wealth of merges of characters, such that no characters in the show  
have individual articles anymore. And, indeed, the old character  
articles were crappy in-universe messes of the sort we want to clean up.

The problem is that it is easy for any of the major series regular  
characters to have an article written about them. Gilmore Girls was a  
critical darling of a show, actors regularly gave interviews, all  
seasons are on DVD with a decent number of special features that  
provide out-of-universe information. The information is clearly and  
transparently there. The articles could have eventually been improved.

But the articles did not satisfy notability in their old forms, and so  
are now gone. And, worse than gone, they're redirects - which means  
that a newbie user is going to have a much harder time figuring out  
how to go about fixing them. Redlinks at least cry out to be fixed.  
Redirects avoid being fixed. And since the characters now exist in a  
list, incremental improvement is a real challenge. The format of the  
articles doesn't lend itself to expansion into new areas, as it seems  
weird to have only one entry on a list have out-of-universe  
information. Furthermore, the nature of a list os succinctness -  
expanding an entry with a lot of information is unwanted.

Deletion at least left a visible hole in our coverage that anybody  
could see and fix. Redirects, through a combination of unclear  
interface ("How do I fix/make a redirect" is just about the most  
common question asked by my non-wiki using friends when they try to  
edit) and an institutional resistance to un-merging that is almost as  
bad as abusive G4 speedies, redirectionism seems to me to destroy our  
coverage of areas more severely than deletion.

The real culprit here is WP:N, which does not do nearly enough to  
protect articles on topics that obviously could pass its standard of  
notability, but do not yet. The anti-eventualist bias of this  
requiring of multiple independent sources to be cited before an  
article can avoid deletion is appalling. We need to remember that  
articles grow slowly, and that a mediocre start is still a better  
foundation for an article than a redirect.

-Phil