Andrew Lih wrote:
Stan, I tend to agree there is a (perhaps misplaced) sense of urgency about having to "mop up" quickly, list things on VfD, etc. Some of it might be arrogance or nastiness.
But I'd like to offer another interpretation - there is no confidence these suspicious edits will be found or caught later. And that can bug certain types of people. Of all the mechanisms Wikipedia has for tracking changes and edits, perhaps the weakest is how to allow new entires to linger for a specified period and grow, and then come back to evaluate later. For many, "check it later" means "check it never."
I guess this could be cast as a finer grain interpretation of inclusionism and deletionism.
Absolute inclusionist - any and everything should be in Wikipedia Optimistic inclusionist - maybe not good now, but it may be, keep and check back later Pessimistic deletionist - may be good sometime, but delete it now, and keep only when good Absolute deletionist - it's not "encyclopediac", get rid of it
In that spectrum I would classify myself as "optimistic inclusionist".
Beyond the universally recognized vandalism which I would delete immediately most of this stuff is harmless. Those who feel strongly that something needs to be deleted should develop their own mechanisms for tracking it (perhaps on a sub-page of their own user page) If the material becomes lost and nobody notices it for a year or more, so what? In a database of 500,000 items it's not taking up a lot of space, and the peace of mind that we earn from not having to go through yet another deletion argument is worth a lot more.
One really needs to examine the dynamics of deletionism. One individual has a passion for reviewing new articles for what he considers unencyclopedic. He finds a likely candidate and makes a VfD entry. A cadre of like minded individuals who trust his judgement immediately respond with their votes of support. Those of us who see some value in the article would need to spend a considerable amount of time reviewing the article before we could devise reasonable arguments for its retention, but we all have other priorties, and a limited amount of time for pursuing them. I assure you that campus life at Dartmouth has no personal importance to me whatsoever. My priorities do not include spending the amount of time that I would consider necessary to mount a proper defence of thse articles. The number of Wikipedians to whom they may have enough personal importance is likely very small, certainly rarely enough to quicly offset the deletionists' votes.
Recently, on Wikisource, where I do follow such things someone enterred a scattering of Swedish daily TV schedules going back to 1969. He seems to have stalled after very few. This seems the sort of thing that could inspire even an ardent inclusionist to put weight on the delete button. I am, nevertheless, willing to be patient. I might even be convinced to accept it if he can present things in a consistently informative. In practical terms, I'm confident that the size of his project is well beyond his capacity, and that he will tire very soon. In another month I may even suggest to him that this would be more beneficial if did a more thorough job. I may then seek to delete it as a fragmentary and abandoned experiment, hopefully in a way that does not generate a lot of friction.
What seriously bugs me about it is that we end up with this cadre of passionate, and perhaps obsessive individuals running the show.
Ec