[WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist

[Samuel Klein]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Anthony<wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>>
>> My own take on the deletionist/inclusionist divide (which,
>> admittedly, has little if anything to do with Wikipedia's
>> inclusion policies as currently prescribed) is to ask: would
>> anyone, anywhere in the world (other than the author) ever be
>> interested in reading an encyclopedic treatment of this topic?
>> (And in the case of Bo the first dog, the answer is pretty
>> clearly "yes".)
>>
>
> I recently checked Wikipedia for an article on my local library, and found
> that it was deleted.  If Wikipedia isn't "too" deletionist, then it's
> "improperly" deletionist.
>
> C'mon, a library isn't notable?

We'd be more effective if we had notability guidelines that explicitly
supported expansion of notability to allow more and  more granular
articles over time.  Any monument or building or park that people
invested thousands of hours into, or that people from far away come to
see, or that thousands of people use a year, is notable in its own
right.

Sometimes we address the issue of maintaining balance and quality as a
perpetual fight over lines in the sand, when it's an important effort
worth continual discussion and refinement.

As the number of editors interested in a topic area grows -- something
that happens as WP includes more and more locally-notable entries, for
instance -- the capacity to maintain quality in that area grows as
well.

Sj