After NY Book review & Economist articles I have been thinking...
The debate I vs D became so prominent after Wikipedia decided to focus not on quantity, but rather on quality (when it dawned to people that in 2M+ articles we don't even have 2k featured articles) and require citations for everything. It's not a bad thing in itself... but then it turned into "instead of improving articles, let me delete the worst kind of articles - Pokemon characters, TV episodes, bands, etc. That way I will improve Wikipedia's quality not by adding something better, but by subtracting something worse than the average (or the desired standard)."
Isn't this what's happening now?
[For those who think in math: you can increase the average of [-3; 0; 4; 5; 9] to 6 by either adding 1 to each number (i.e. expanding/cleaning up each article) of by deleting -3 and 0... so which set would be better [-2; 1; 5; 6; 10] or [4; 5; 9]? the questions is not which one is easier...]
Sincerely, Renata3 (a deletionist going through a faith crisis)