On Feb 1, 2008 10:28 PM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
actively destroying much of the information that was aggregated into it
You're talking about the unreferenced, un-useful and embarrassing information that was aggregated in to it. Those of you who keep railing about the "evil trend of deletionism" convienently forget that much of the deleted articles are in direct violation of policies that have nothing to do with notability.
I'm aghast at the general direction this thread seems to be taking, a direction quite well-summarised by your email. Unreferenced != unuseful != embarrassing. I've deleted hundreds if not thousands of articles, but deletionism has been taken to a degree that I don't think any of us original deletionists imagined it would be.
My first thought when I read the initial email was "Wait, this is what the inclusionists used to demand - a codified policy on what we should delete based on verifiability as opposed to notability." But from the emails in this thread, it seems that this policy is going to be interpreted in a ludicrous way.
Wikipedia is a work in progress. We should not expect articles to be perfect or complete, and that extends to citations. So we have some unreferenced material. Cry me a fucking river. The only unreferenced material that should concern is that which is potentially controversial or otherwise could land us in a pile of deep shit.
There are of course good intentions behind this policy, but I see no reason to fix something that isn't broken. We're already getting rid of articles about garage bands and other worthless pieces of crap, and even then, only "much" of the deleted articles are actually this bad, going by *your* words. The present guidelines are already working to throw out the worthless material submitted to us. Why do we need to fix something that isn't broken, and thereby now make articles on obscure third world politicians or obscure third world brands of instant noodles verboten, all for the sake of cackling at some stupid garage band's lack of verifiability/notability?
I might be okay with this policy if everyone else read it the same way I would - that unverifiable, controversial information should be deleted, and that depending on the situation, unverifiable information can also be deleted. But it seems clear to me that the hordes of morons who now call themselves deletionists want anything unverifiable deleted, and don't care that they haven't presented much of a coherent case for changing a policy that is already accomplishing their own stated goals, and that is already, according to them, throwing out material that might not be so shitty.
Johnleemk