I haven't really edited on Wikipedia for a while, and I checked in because I wanted to add some content. But a quick perusal of my watchlist showed that the votes for deletion situation is ridiculous.
The removal of any guidelines for inclusion on vfd (including the most important one: when in doubt, don't delete) is criminal.
So is the separation of guidelines for "regular" people and for administrators.
So is the "merge and delete" attitude. Merging entries into big messes under general titles is much, much worse for the long term health of Wikipedia than having many entries with specific titles.
So is the "kill all ephemera" rampage, since presuming that we know now what will be considered ephemera 10, 20, and 1000 years from now is pathetically presumptive, especially considering there are NO SPACE LIMITATIONS on Wikipedia.
So is the obvious takeover of the VfD page by a horde of deletionists. Once upon a time one vote against deletion was enough to stop deletion. And that is all it should take.
So is, imho, the renewed assault on the sep. 11 pages, but I guess that's to be expected, since the argument "some people put so much work into carefully researching the reports on the lives of the people killed that day and creating entries for them, and we can't be bothered to do the same for other people who have been killed, so we should delete all the entries" will never die.
Again, now that we have better stub-indication technology, there should be *less* need for deletion, rather than more.
Also, if a page has been around for a year or two and been seen by a bunch of eyeballs, there's probably a reason it's there, and it probably shouldn't be deleted.
yours, tc