Timwi wrote:
John Lee wrote:
- Articles about "non-notable" stuff does not hurt Wikipedia. Since
noone cares about the stuff, noone will link to it and noone will search for it and NOONE will ever see it!
A keyword search can easily bring up non-notable articles. When somebody sees an entry resembling a blog posting, what will they think of Wikipedia?
They will think "Whee! There's stuff to improve!" and become a contributor.
That happens like what - how often? Most people I know would just close the window and Google the topic elsewhere. They might think, "An encyclopedia about somebody's breakfast? Ok...."
If it's a notable article, it will be improved anyway.
An article goes through VfD for how long? 5 days? 7 days? Hardly enough to give people time to improve a bad article on an obscure topic.
Those interested will know that it is on VfD. If it is arcane, there's a chance no current Wikipedian knows about the subject yet, in which case, I say it's better safe than sorry to delete. A better article can be recreated later.
Honestly, if I had to pick between deleting a (hypothetical) article on Ronald Reagan which is full of unrelated nonsense about doing drugs or keeping it in the hopes somebody would improve it, I'd do the former without skipping a beat.
Of course, that is an extreme example. How about Anthere's recent example:
The '''medlar''' is a [[fruit]].
Admittedly, this article is:
- short
- incomplete
However, it is also:
- factually accurate
- NPOV
- actually something I didn't know!
Hence, it is useful.
I would vote keep and put on cleanup. It is not rubbish.
Having an article only gives the impression to readers that we tolerate junk.
Which is good. If we give the impression to readers that we tolerate only full-grown complete articles, we will detract contributors who are perhaps not quite as good a writer as they would like to be.
I think you misunderstood. I was trying to say that at the very least, we should prove we have some credibility by at the very least having articles on notable/verifiable topics only. If there's good content but bad formatting, it's for cleanup. If it's just non-notable crap, it shouldn't be on Wikipedia.
I'd rather receive complaints from readers that we don't have an article on Ronald Reagan than complaints that our article of Ronald Reagan is useless, which in turn will lead to questioning the credibility of other innocent articles.
The missing of an article on Ronald Reagan would similarly lead to questioning the completeness of other innocent articles.
Better to have no information instead of misleading information.
Now, please don't get me wrong; I am not a complete inclusionist, either. For example, I too don't think it would make sense to have a separate article on every single school anyone ever went to. However, I have been wanting to contribute to advanced topics in Computation Theory and Complexity Theory, but have been a bit hesitant to do so because some of the things I want to write about would start out as simple stubs and risk being deleted.
I'd encourage you to do so. I started [[resort]], which is still a stub after close to a year, and it was VfDed in less than a few hours, yet survived. Most Wikipedians aren't extreme deletionists. I don't vote to delete stubs or substubs, just patent nonsense.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])