I haven't had much time for Wikipedia stuff lately, but I've been watching the lists... the main reason I've refrained from several-day-delayed responses has been that Cunctator has said it better than I could. With this thread, it's very good to see Jimbo reminding people of the principles at work here.
I've seen a distinct slide downward with VFD lately... a couple weeks ago, I decided that I would no longer vote 'delete' on any article. Which doesn't mean I voted keep on everything... only for those I felt had distinct value. I abstained from otehrs simply because there's already so many delete votes that will automatically appear for practically anything on VFD...
An experiment I won't make because I hate when people do stupid things to prove a point, and I fear the point'd be proven: List everything on Brilliant Prose on VFD. See how many delete votes you get. It'd likely be a rather large number, with anything under 32K decried as a "useless stub" and "unencyclopedic", and over 32K as a "long and pointless ramble".
Now, there's been discussion on [[Wikipedia_talk:Deletion policy]] about criteria for valid voting. This is discussed in a few ways, but there is a valid point that if there are going to be votes, there needs to be something to oppose "sock puppets"... now that the edit-count barrier dropped from 100 to 25, and the account is only required to have existed for one week, I don't have a particular problem with it. The 2/3s majority for deletion bothers me a lot, even if (as has been pointed out to me) there are very few articles that end up with votes in the range between 2/3 and 3/4 (which I consider much more sensible). The trouble is, there are relatively few people pushing for rules that restrict deletion- the majority of opinions on the matter seem to be interested in reducing barriers to deletion as fast as possible, putting the burden of proof on those defending an article... the second most vocal faction (and it's become disturbingly factionalized there) is those saying that it should all be a consensus thing, that any voting is evil, that one person should be able to block any action. Which I don't find terribly helpful.
I've seen a lot of dodging of the "what does it hurt?" question, the most I've seen is "it DOES hurt" or "it doesn't belong in an encyclopedia". The first response isn't an answer, and begs the question to be repeated. As to the second... what do you define an encyclopedia as? LKWR is the only one I've seen outline criteria (back on 10/31), 4 of which describe Wikipedia excellently, and I disagree with the other 2. The issue is that when people say "encyclopedia" they tend to be referring to "paper encyclopedia", which is effectively all that's existed to date- all the big encyclopedias have CD and 'net versions these days, but they're just the paper with lots of pictures and some sounds and movies here and there: the people who work on those versions are specifically told not to put work into any text that won't go into the paper version (I have this from a friend who worked on Grolier's online edition, who informs me that the others do the same.). Wiki Is Not Paper. I strongly oppose use of things like "that's not what an encyclopedia is", because what are you using as a standard? F&W, Britannica, Grolier, something like that, yes? They're designed around what fits in paper- there's massive size constraints. A full print copy of Britannica is really, really big.
(This is getting a bit long.) I'm going to propose again what I proposed once before: a temporary moratorium on deletions. Let's say two weeks. Copyvios will be the only exception. Blanking can be used if there's felt to be no value at all to the content, but if there's verifiable information in it, leave it. Let's try it and see what happens, hmmm?
-- Jake