Delirium wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Some people just don't get it. Most of what Mark describes really should be deleted, but that's not the issue. The issue is about a demented voting system that alienates people. It's about people who judge the work of others to be crap. If people don't get around to fixing these articles for a while it's NO BIG DEAL. In the midst of 167,000 articles this handful is no challenge to the credibility of Wikipedia.
I'm not that sure about that. I've actually run across non-articles on Wikipedia before while doing research, which was rather annoying (for example, a dump of the full text of some treaty masquerading as an "article" on that treaty). If we didn't delete these sorts of things, there'd be a lot more of that, which I think would hurt Wikipedia's credibility ("250,000 articles, but only 190,000 real ones" isn't a good tagline). When someone finds a Wikipedia article, it should be at least a decent stub, in order to keep our reputation for quality at least moderately high. "Oh, Wikipedia doesn't have an article on this subject" is a lot better than "Wikipedia has an article on this subject, let me click on that... oh, never mind, it's not a real article, just a 155KB text dump."
But under the current Wikipedia rules, you're allowed and even encouraged to replace that text dump with a one-sentence stub, no questions asked, no votes required, and almost certainly no one objecting. It should arouse curiosity that a normal everyday task of clearing junk text suddenly becomes a big deal when it's a '''DELETION''', since the net effect is very nearly the same.
Ironically, we even tell people not to make a big deal when reverting vandalism, so as not to gratify the vandals' desire for attention. How they must enjoy the fierce combats that erupt over VfD-listed articles! (And indeed some of the postings on VfD clearly indicate that articles are being created precisely to start fights - the trolls are now having to push their plates back before they burst at the seams. :-) )
Stan