On 18/06/07, K P kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
Sadly adding new topics becomes not a drive to add them, but more time spent trying to keep them, then it takes to actually enter and write them. (...) Inappropriate deletion creates time, it diverts people's energies from what interests them, what brought them to Wikipedia in the first place, and forces them to "save" articles that should be in Wikipedia.
I know I only ever seem to reply to you when you talk about deletionism, but it occurs to me I've never brought up my experience.
I spent a lot of my on-wiki time of the first half of the year churning out a large set of stubby "framework articles" on various topics; nothing remarkable, a couple of sentences each and a reference and some categories. I was, at times, turning out ten an hour. A lot of them even *I* consider borderline significant - we're talking "obscure Victorian statutes" here.
I got one nomination for deletion - a mistaken speedy from someone who was confused about a disambiguation page (well, duh, of *course* it had no content). Looking through the list I keep in userspace, maybe three have been nominated for deletion, and two were kept - the third was a decision I don't agree with, but it fit with an existing line of consensus dating back quite a while. One got politely queried - so I explained thier significance better - and one got merged into a larger page, where it was arguably more useful anyway.
So, you know, there's my anecdote, just to balance all these tales of woe. I'm running at maybe 1% of articles challenged for inclusion, and only a fraction of those removed. Maybe I get deference (but I doubt it); maybe I just have the knack of making things look "right" in their first draft; maybe my working hours are less 'dangerous' than yours. But I don't meet a piranha tank of deletion; I create and watchlist and forget, and they sit there for months.