RickK lied, saying:
This would be great if it weren't for such users as Anthony DiPierro, who will, out of reflex, vote to keep any and every article ever written. He is on record as saying that every person and every company ever in existence should be kept, regardless of their notability or the
notability
of the articles written about them.
First of all, stop lying. I don't vote to keep any and every article, any more than you vote to delete every and every article.
As for my statement "that every person and every company ever in existence should be kept", the grammatical error in that statement points to where you misquoted me. I believe that every person and every company ever in existence is notable, and by that I mean the topic is worthy of note in Wikipedia. If an article on that person is not verifiable, then I don't think it should be kept. If an article on a company does not provide a link to a respectable source such as a government document or a newspaper article, then I don't think it should be kept (although if there is no reason to believe it is fake I think we could move it to the talk page).
Other people said:
I didn't say non-notability is a valid excuse for deletion (lots of people seem to read things into what I write that I didn't write).
I'm sure people use the term in other ways, but the question of notability is what VfD is all about. Is the topic worthy of note in Wikipedia? The problem isn't that we delete things that are non-notable, the problem is that "not notable" is the entire argument for deletion so much of the time, and that begs the question. It's also a problem that VfD is set up to ignore most people's points of view. Some people think that all US Presidents are notable. Some think that all US cities are notable. Some think that all US high schools are notable. But these beliefs are ignored most of the time because in order to express them you have to vote over and over and over again on the exact same issue.
That's taking inclusionism too far, probably even for anthony's tastes. At least anthony thinks unverifiable articles should be deleted. Unless the facts about the dead cat are verifiable from a secondary source, it really has no place in an encyclopedia. I think that's something practically everyone on both sides of the debate can agree on.
Yes. I think we could have an article on [[Tom Quartz]] and [[Slippers the cat]], but I think the number of dead cat articles we can reasonably have is very small. In fact, even in the case of Tom and Slippers, it would probably be best to redirect these topics to another article, such as [[Theodore Roosevelt]] or [[Presidential cats]], at least until they grow too big. I'm rarely opposed to merging a tiny article with a larger one.
I note with a combination of amusement and horror but no surprise at all that almost if not all parties involved in that discussion aside from Rick are relatively new contributors (moreso at the time of the discussion). What we're seeing seems to be a result of the massive influx of new users who either don't understand Wikipedia or its long-standing policies and principles, or don't care.
That's in part because the "long standing policies and principles" of deletionism are largely unwritten, and are determined by a small faction of people who hang out on VfD. Don't worry, these new contributors will either be driven away by the deletionists or learn to love Big Brother. Maybe some of them will even participate in the Two Minutes of Hate we call VfD.
Somehow, I think you'll find it's the deletionists who've generally been here longer, and done the hard yards of actually working on good articles, rather than spending their wiki time trying to turn Wikipedia into Wikijunkyard.
I don't think that's the case. I just think that things like VfD, speedy deletions, the difficult undeletion policy, and the abrasiveness of some of the deletionists (I've been blocked for listing articles on VfU, as well as for voting Keep on VfD) have caused the vast majority of inclusionists to give up or become closet inclusionists (i.e. eventualists).
Anthony