On 9/20/05, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
The problem is that this leads to an inclusionist position with a substantial and non-trivial exclusionist force that goes and mucks things up. The result is, I think, bad, and bad in a way that is still exclusionist. The result is that, instead of a consistent exclusionism, we have an inconsistent one - some number of articles will get deleted, those articles will stay deleted regardless of the arguments to the contrary, and those articles will be selected more or less at random.
Well there is a substantial exclusionist faction on Wikipedia. While they obviously don't enjoy consensus support (viz: Deletion policy, history of organised attempts to exclude articles about schools, pikachu, cartoons, etc) they're entitled to express their views.
Wikipedia isn't supposed to have a consistent policy. It's just supposed to make decisions we can live with, even if we need to grit out teeth.
I suspect that the more exclusionist a position one takes about wikipedia content, the more likely one is to have resource to gritting one's teeth. Wikipedia is filling up with articles about animators, books, radio DJs, episodes of old TV shows, drinking games, jokes, and all manner of subjects that would probably not make it into a paper encyclopedia.
This process is inexorable. In the absence of widespread uproar at this massive influx of articles on obscure subjects, the exclusionist position is unsalvageable. By default, we have created an aggressively inclusionist encyclopedia.
There are no effective policy tools by which this situation could be reversed.