michael west wrote:
If we are going to label ourselves, I would call myself an "Inclusionist with reservations". The problem with all out inclusionism is that if you are going to defend an article in Afd is that to prove its worth keeping one has to get out and source and rewrite sections.
There is no such thing as an "all out inclusionism", but it serves demonization better to put forth the myth that there is such a thing. It makes attacking inclusionism much easier. I think that most of us who identify with inclusionism have the kind of reservations that you express, built on respect for those who work in subject areas that we know nothing about.
Most articles are never going to become featured articles or for that matter Good Articles. Keeping articles on every High School (or this weeks small Afd purge on British University Students' Unions) means that in order to keep them from the cull they have to be sourced and updated.
And that takes time and careful research. The sources are there, but nobody will ever be able to do a good job at it when a large number of articles are under the deletionist gun at the same time.
I have sympathy witha lot of new editors who think that there articles should be included. Many of them provide sources from local newspapers but its hard to defend them at Afd.
Not everyone accepts local newspapers as valid sources, but when the importance of an article is primarily local they may be the only valid source.
Ec