Earlier: "... there were articles for most episodes from the "Scrubs" TV show... spent an hour or so tidying everything up...notice that category:Scrubs episodes was up for speedy deletion... it was empty...every episode article has been wiped out...some group of editors...cut a swath of destruction... [yet] an article...on a much more obscure play...[remains]...plays are "literary"[?]...Why should...[anyone] ...spend[...]any further effort on improving Wikipedia articles when so much of their work is just being arbitrarily swept away?...[how to save] the content and the eyeballs that Wikipedia's throwing away[?]..."
Peter Blaise responds: Yes, the Wikipedia deletionists are driving away more contributors and readers than any other destructive thing.
No vandal or spammer or off-topic posts are as overwhelmingly souring as the act of Wikipedia deletionists.
Your example is perfect.
Farscape and other such experiences are important cultural references for shared communication, just as Aesops fables or Greek mythology or "the parables" or that silly bard Shakespeare's stuff and so on.
And, all of it was once contemporaneous.
Another example: just as there will never be another "The Beatles", there will never be another "this is more important than anything else" thing, ever. Nowadays, obscure bands garner big audiences and way more album sales and royalties than The Beatles ever did, and to delete references to them because they are not equivalent to "The Beatles" is myopic, ethnocentric, and just plain mindnumbedness. Farscape and Galaxy Quest and so on are important - the proof is the Wikipedia visitors saying so by building the pages.
For anyone to delete contemporaneous culture, especially anything so meticulously entered by other Wikipedia visitors, is a crying shame, and one of the top reasons I think Wikipedia is seriously crippled (regardless of page count growth), and now depends on endless newbies for the impedimentia (impacted admins) to feed on, and the Wikipedia middle class is fading away.
Okay, here's my rubber stamp recommendations, please help simplify and polish these:
Goal: Wikipedia is to be free and open to all, no banning, with multiple co-moderators who are here to provide support for contributors and readers, everything open, public, transparent.
- there are no rules for contributors, only guidelines, npov and so on.
- there are only rules for admins: - no banning - develop an open, public, transparent moderation system, - no deleting of anything that is not spam, not vandalism, or not off topic; suspect contributions and content go into a open, public, transparent moderation system - if you can't make an article better, move on and let someone else have at it, do not delete, do not delete, do not delete, - do not delete.
Whiner responds: But there's a lot of crap on Wikipedia! WaaaaAAAAAhhhHHH!
Peter Blaise responds: Yes, so either make it better, or move on and let someone else have a try. Do not delete, do not delete, do not delete.
Do not delete.
== http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Television_episodes ==
[EPOSIDES] is recommendation only, poorly founded, and horribly misguided. It makes no sense to include only supposedly externally "notable" things in an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia, being a place where people look up obscure things, is, by definition, a place where obscure, previously nun-noted things are stored for others to eventually take note. "Notability" is, by definition, in the eye of the beholder, and therefor, anyone who takes note of something enough to create or contribute to an encyclopedia article, is, by definition sharing something that is notable TO THEM, and the only way it will ever be notable to anyone else is if it STAYS in the encyclopedia. This entire "notability" thing is pure, unadulterated crap.