Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
Sit back, calm down and wait to see if he's still remembered in a year's time seems a perfectly reasonable approach for an *encyclopaedia* to take here. But of course I was for not having the article in the first place. Guy (JzG)
As one who would probably be categorized as an eventualist, and as one who doesn't pay any particular attention to internet fads, I'm pretty calm already. I don't really care about the subject of this article. The thing that is getting my particular dander up is simply the technical abuse of deletion as a way to "store" content we might eventually want back for a long period of time.
The notion that it's better to delete controversial articles than it is to work out the problems with them is also problematic to me, but mainly as a direct consequence of that first bit. Content that we may eventually want back should never be deleted if we can at all help it. Put it in a subpage of the article's talk: page for a year if need be, or some wikipedia: namespace vault somewhere, or even a user: subpage. Heck, even just blanking and protecting the article would be preferable.