2009/1/6 White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com
Am I over extending myself when I wish to see proof of consensus behind the mass removals?
There is no consensus, and there never will be, by definition almost: we'll never have "serious treatment of every group member's considered opinion". And I don't think this is something that can be solved by consensus anyway.
As David Goodman said: it's time for a firm policy. From on high: decide once and for all on the inclusionist/deletionist party line, and then stick to it.
The way things are now, it's much easier by far for radical deletionists to have their way than for any sort of inclusionist, for obvious reasons: a delete or delete-by-redirect is done in a fraction of the time it takes to write an article.
Everywhere you look, articles are being deleted, and it's not limited to Episodes & Characters of webcomics--just now I tried to look up [[Julie Powell]] (film starring Meryl Streep in production about her, reliable sources up the wazoo): article deleted for lack of notability.
How can you look at a spree like [[user:TTN]]'s and *not* feel bad? Add up the hours spent editing the articles he's deleting, the hours wasted trying to stop the deletion, the editors disgusted, discouraged and driven away...
The Economist was not exagerating, last year, when they called it a battle for the soul of Wikipedia. This situation is getting worse all the time.
And it's time someone put a stop to it.
Either say we're like a paper encyclopedia and we don't do popular culture, we discourage stubs, we insist on extremely broad notability and we think of ourselves a a kind of Encyclopedia Brittanica. Or say we're like the Wikipedia I started editing in 2002.
Michel Vuijlsteke