On 3/7/08, Renata St renatawiki@gmail.com wrote:
The debate I vs D became so prominent after Wikipedia decided to focus not on quantity, but rather on quality (when it dawned to people that in 2M+ articles we don't even have 2k featured articles) and require citations for everything. It's not a bad thing in itself... but then it turned into "instead of improving articles, let me delete the worst kind of articles - Pokemon characters, TV episodes, bands, etc. That way I will improve Wikipedia's quality not by adding something better, but by subtracting something worse than the average (or the desired standard)."
You're confusing two kinds of "quality".
1) There is the inherent "quality" that a subject brings to an encyclopaedia. An encyclopaedia full of articles on subjects like Morocco, Ghandi, and the West Coast Eagles, is supposedly "better" than an encyclopaedia full of articles on minor TV characters etc. 2) There is the actual "quality" of a given article, regardless of its subject. An FA is "better" than a stub.
Deleting articles on Pokémon characters might "improve" the encyclopaedia by definition 1, but would actually make it worse by definition 2, since all the Pokémon character articles are pretty good.
Steve