Or: The Continuing Saga of the Disaster That is Notability
[[Fábio Pereira da Silva]] is a player on the first squad of Manchester United - the current European club football champions. This is, by any standard, a big deal. He passes [[WP:N]] trivially, requiring all of 15 seconds to find multiple independent sources. Nobody sane would dispute that he is a notable, high-profile figure.
However, WP:ATHLETE says that athletes can only be included if they compete professionally. he was injured when Man U bought him, and so, despite being a high-profile and much-covered signing, he has yet to appear for the squad. He's listed as part of the squad. He has a shirt number. He's the subject of much media coverage. But he hasn't appeared on the pitch yet. And because of close-parsing of WP:ATHLETE, his article was deleted. (Mind you, I dispute the entire notion that individuals compete in professional soccer. There are no individual trophies. Teams compete, and he is a member of Manchester United)
There is no question that he is a notable figure, by both our idiosyncratic definition and by any common sense definition. There is no question that he is someone we will have an article about. There is no question about the accuracy of the article we had. But because of technicalities, the article is deleted, and plenty of people are willing to wheel war and insist on process over the obvious product.
I will note, my investment in this is that I wanted to know what position he played, and I couldn't find it on Wikipedia. Which is to say, I was acting as a user in this case, looking up a clearly notable person, and was denied because people are insistent on technicality- based argument instead of thinking about usefulness.
The real problem here, though, is that our notability policies expressly encourage this sort of bean-counting instead of considering process. We have reduced inclusion decisions as much as possible to mechanical operations, often because of reasoning about how people will "abuse" discretion and push for bad decisions on AfD. And so instead we have mechanical precision conducting its own abuses with no room for discretion-based oversight.
This remains the most pernicious legacy of deletionism on Wikipedia - the complete rejection of what our users actually want and use the site for in favor of mechanical decision making created because people were frustrated at the number of users who wanted to block their idiocy in specific cases, so they created a general rule that ignored the specific.
I continue to defy anyone to give me one good reason why the complete demolition of WP:N and its associated pages, and the replacement of them with a simple paragraph on the importance of only documenting things of lasting importance would not lead to a better and more harmonious project.
-Phil