Ray Saintonge wrote:
Some people just don't get it. Most of what Mark describes really should be deleted, but that's not the issue. The issue is about a demented voting system that alienates people. It's about people who judge the work of others to be crap. If people don't get around to fixing these articles for a while it's NO BIG DEAL. In the midst of 167,000 articles this handful is no challenge to the credibility of Wikipedia.
I'm not that sure about that. I've actually run across non-articles on Wikipedia before while doing research, which was rather annoying (for example, a dump of the full text of some treaty masquerading as an "article" on that treaty). If we didn't delete these sorts of things, there'd be a lot more of that, which I think would hurt Wikipedia's credibility ("250,000 articles, but only 190,000 real ones" isn't a good tagline). When someone finds a Wikipedia article, it should be at least a decent stub, in order to keep our reputation for quality at least moderately high. "Oh, Wikipedia doesn't have an article on this subject" is a lot better than "Wikipedia has an article on this subject, let me click on that... oh, never mind, it's not a real article, just a 155KB text dump."
I do agree that the whole process should be less antagonistic, but I'm not too sure what to do about that. There are some fundamental disagreements about what sorts of things should be in Wikipedia (for example, [[List of multiracial people]]), and somehow these have to be resolved. I'm not sure "just don't delete any of them" is the best resolution (another easy one would be "delete all lists", but I don't think that's particularly good either--though it might not be any worse than "leave all lists", really).
-Mark