Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:
Jimbo Wales wrote:
For [articles so trivial as to deserve deletion] the least controversial rule is confirmability.
That policy doesn't help the project much.
Is it that it doesn't help much, or that you don't like the answer that it gives? Do you see what I'm asking, here?
It seems to me that most objections to confirmability is that it doesn't encourage us to delete stuff that the objector would like to see deleted.
Shall we modify the Rambot to upload the U.S. Census tapes prior to 1890 (or whatever year they are now available for)?
The actions of Bots, versus human entered entries, are a different matter, for which we should exercise much stricter scrutiny.
Also, we need not make policy for imagined problems that don't really exist. If lots and lots of people start adding confirmable but allegedly pointless information, *to the point where it looks likely to cause some actual problem* (like excessive namespace collisions, or a cluttered search engine), then we will have a problem.
If someone asks "Can I make a bot to upload the Census tapes?" we will just say no, but this has little to do with the current discussion, I think.
Similarly, some states now have property tax information on line, including photos. Shall we upload all this, and have an article on every address? "No, they would just be stubs!" "Then merge them into articles on each street in each town that can be 32k long!" Clearly importance of the topic becomes a criteria, not just verifiability.
I will gladly concede that there are conceivable circumstances that would lead us to be forced to include something more specific, but _until we have that problem_, I don't see why we should bother having a deletion policy to deal with *forcing* it out.
The encouragement of good social graces seems enough, and also just leaving people alone instead of hassling them seems good, too.
(If someone wants to start making a point by entering a bunch of information about their ancestors, I'll remind them that I am all in favor of social pressure to not do such a thing, and not absolutely opposed to deletion in specific cases designed specifically to troll us!)
A little leniency and common sense will go a long way towards mitigating any possible problems.
--Jimbo