On Fri, 21 Dec 2007, David Goodman wrote:
It's not just having a complete set--though that surely matters. (We can have a complete set by other means too, such as combination articles with enough information about the individual parts). It's also about consistency--the particular items kept are not necessarily the most important of them--our precision of deciding at AfD is nowhere near that good, and will never be while we refuse to recognize precedent. Lack of consistency makes us look incompetent to do the real work of building a good encyclopedia.
You know, I could say the same about spoiler tags--spoiler tagging all spoilers for consistency is better even if it does tag some plot sections that you can already tell contain spoilers.
In fact, I did say that. Nobody cared.
Even more, it's about the practical operation of WP. The work of arguing each individual article is excessive.
I could say that about spoiler tags too.
I think this episode deletionism pretty much proves that removal of spoiler tags--and the particular ways the system was gamed in order to do it--was far from unique.
Of course you need to look back further than spoiler tags for this. Webcomic deletion has a lot in common with episode deletion too. Sure, a lot of those webcomic articles did deserve deletion, but that was simply because indiscriminate deletion will always catch some that really deserve it.