Forking the last discussion, many moons ago I had worked on John Laird http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Laird_(California) You'll notice that he was Mayor of Santa Cruz for two terms. Just on a lark I scanned for other Mayors of Santa Cruz and came up with a half-dozen or so and some that could probably be worked up with various decent sources. In fact a few of them, I'm surprised that we don't yet have an article about. At any rate, I'm sure nobody would object to having the list of Mayors of San Francisco for example with an article about each (where we could find good sources), but how small do we want to go? In terms of actual articles, boxes, categories about political figures? A list of all mayors of a city like Tacoma Washington with a population of about 300,000 ? Santa Cruz only has a population of about 75,000. John Laird just happens to be more than normally famous because he went on to bigger things. Will Johnson

2009/8/13 Andrew Gray <andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk>uk>: Indeed, the debate have moved from general arguments about overall philosophy to specific arguments about where to draw the line in specific topics.

David Gerard wrote: Closest I could find is [[User:Jfdwolff]], who is a member of Association of Deletionist Wikipedians since 2004. He's a dutch doctor but UK resident.

Thanks so much to everyone who replied to my email about finding a 'deletionist' (for want of a better word). It's been really useful to hear your takes on the subject. The main points that have become clear to me from this discussion on and offlist is that 1. The inclusionist / deletionist debate peaked a few years ago 2. BLPs are perhaps the area where the inclusionist/deletionist debate is most vibrant - for various reasons 3. A strong argument that remains for adopting a slightly more deletionist attitude is that some WP users go to it as a primary source for vital information (e.g. medical advice). To address these briefly: as I mentioned in my first mail the programme takes a historical look at the first 20 years of the World Wide Web - so hopefully the Wikipedia deletionist / inclusionist issue is legitimate from that perspective - would you agree? The timing of the PARC press release http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/ which triggered the Guaridan article coincidied unexpectedly with my request to you, but our programme won't go out until early next year, so for us it's not so much a question of seizing on a newsworthy story, as reflecting on how Wikipedia has been shaped since its inception. The feeling from the programme team is that debates over criteria for inclusion - all the issues that surround adding content/deleting/reverting edits/controlling vandalism - are really fundamental to an understanding of what Wikipedia is. It's great to hear about the issues surrounding BLPS, and thanks to all those who pointed me in this direction and explained the subject so lucidly. "Deletionism" is clearly a contentious term, but from what I've read and heard there are still arguments in favour of more rigurous control of what qualifies for inclusion. Libel/offence in BLPs, and the question of WP being used for medical advice are two big arguments in favour of this - are there others which some of you would also consider still current? It's be great to hear more of your thoughts on this - if you want to join the debate on our blog we're really really keen for people to contribute, precisely so we can try to include the issues that are important to you, and so you can help us NOT be misleading! There are several posts on the blog about Wikipedia - here's Jimmy Wales's post for example http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/digitalrevolution/2009/07/what-was-my-goal-wh en-i-came-u.shtml. Enjoy! Best wishes, Cathy Cathy Edwards Digital Revolution Room MC4 C6, BBC Media Centre, 201 Wood Lane, London, W12 7TQ T 0208 008 3985 digital revolution (working title) is an open and collaborative documentary about how the web is changing our lives join the conversation on the web at www.bbc.co.uk/digitalrevolution or follow us on twitter @BBCDigRev -----Original Message----- From: David Gerard [mailto:dgerard@gmail.com] Sent: 13 August 2009 22:05 To: English Wikipedia Cc: Cathy Edwards Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary 2009/8/12 Cathy Edwards <Cathy.Edwards(a)bbc.co.uk>uk>: Does such a person actually exist, self-identified? It appears from similar discussion on wikimediauk-l that it doesn't, in fact. (I suspect some corners of the media won't care, and we actually considered picking someone to claim to be a "deletionist" and go on programmes talking sense instead. This is an eample of the interests of the media *not* being the interests of the encylcopedia at al, and us having to work around that.) Some seem to call others "deletionists" for deleting stuff that they don't like. But as someone who's generally fairly inclusionist (and has been called a "radical inclusionist" and gone "wtf" at the notion), I can tell you that reviewing 24 hours of [[Special:Newpages]] will convince you that lots of pages deserve death by cleansing fire as absolutely quickly as possible. So we're talking about increasingly fine gradations. And basically, the media has seized upon this as an interesting and story-worthy idea about four or five years after anyone actually working on Wikipedia cared. - d. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated. If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system. Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately. Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails sent or received. Further communication will signify your consent to this.

2009/8/17 Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>om>: The original debate was global, there were people that believed our standards should be much stricter all over and there were people the believed our standards should be much more relaxed all over. That global debate finished years ago, there are now separate debates regarding different topics (BLPs and fiction are the two main ones, I think). Classifying people as "inclusionist" or "deletionist" doesn't work in the current environment since someone might be on one side for one topic and the other for others.

2009/8/18 Brock Weller <brock.weller(a)gmail.com>om>: Well said. That debate was resolved back in the days when we actually reached consensus occasionally! There are too many people for that to work, these days. However hard you try, you never find a solution that everyone will accept.

2009/8/18 Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>om>: Yeah, look up "consensus" in a dictionary rather than on [[Wikipedia:Consensus]], you will find the word actually means something quite different to what Wikipedians generally use it to mean (which is actually called "supermajority").

2009/8/18 Kat Walsh <mindspillage(a)gmail.com>om>: I have had people tell me "you can't do that, we reached consensus otherwise" and I go look and it's a straw poll that's *literally* two people voting for, one against. So it's always useful to check what someone's calling "consensus." - d.

2009/8/18 Kat Walsh <mindspillage(a)gmail.com>om>: We completed the drift into supermajorities a year or two ago. Decisions on individual articles are still sometimes made by consensus because there aren't many people interested in them, but any decisions involving more than about a dozen people resort to a simple vote. "Rough consensus" only differs from supermajority when there is someone authorised to draw a conclusion from it and they are willing to do more than count votes. The only such authorisation is crats deciding RFAs and they stopped being willing to do more than count votes a while back.

2009/8/18 Cathy Edwards <Cathy.Edwards(a)bbc.co.uk>uk>: Good question. I think it is because fictional topics are very polarising when it comes to the question of how interesting they are. Fans of that particular work find every aspect of it extremely interesting, people that don't watch that show/read that series of books/whatever find it all extremely boring. There isn't much of a middle ground. It is difficult for the extremes to move towards the middle when there isn't anyone there, and that is what is required to reach a consensus.

2009/8/18 Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>om>: I think we've pretty much reached a consensus there. While some people write from an in-universe perspective, there haven't been many objections recently to people going through a rewriting it.

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 12:54 PM, David Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is about 95% of the truth, actually. Other articles *can* cause harm in exactly the same way, but are not as obvious or attractive a target. -Kat -- Your donations keep Wikipedia online: http://donate.wikimedia.org/en Wikimedia, Press: kat(a)wikimedia.org * Personal: kat(a)mindspillage.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage * (G)AIM:Mindspillage mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net * email for phone

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 1:07 PM, David Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Oh, I agree that everyone became aware that articles on living people needed special handling around then. It's just that people do not sufficiently appreciate that they are only the most easily-identifiable subset of the articles requiring that same care. -Kat -- Your donations keep Wikipedia online: http://donate.wikimedia.org/en Wikimedia, Press: kat(a)wikimedia.org * Personal: kat(a)mindspillage.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage * (G)AIM:Mindspillage mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net * email for phone

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 1:55 AM, Cathy Edwards<Cathy.Edwards(a)bbc.co.uk> wrote: I'll offer two reasons: 1) Because editors are unable, in general, to distinguish between the desirability of including a topic, and the desirability of including the current article written on that topic. They see a crappy article and think "crappy topic". 2) Because editors react rather viscerally and unhelpfully to certain topics. I don't like Pokémon, but I begrudingly accept the wisdom of articles on Pokémon characters. I find the difficult struggle to define the borders of the encyclopaedia very interesting, but dubbing it the "deletionism/inclusionism debate" is really oversimplifying it. It implies that there is some group that wants the encyclopaedia to have a certain number of articles (say, 2 million) and another group that wants it to have a larger number (say, 10 million). In practice, it's not like that, there are individual struggles in every area. These struggles have to take place because different people's instincts tell them different things, and there are no clear universal principles to define what's in and out. Nor, other than extreme positions like "include everything about which there is at least one source", could there be. Personally, I'm much more convinced by arguments about the cost of maintaining articles in certain areas versus their value to end users - a cost/benefit analysis. But the debate is rarely framed in these terms. As an example, I wrote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_deal_a_day in 2007. It attracts a fair bit of spam, and a reasonable amount of effort from editors to keep it clean. Is it worth it? By contrast, dozens of other stubs that I've written require very little maintenance effort, other than occasional recategorising, interwiki linking, geo coord linking etc. People seem very unwilling or uninterested in engaging in this kind of analysis. Steve

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 6:59 PM, stevertigo<stvrtg(a)gmail.com> wrote: I've found I've changed over the last 4 or 5 years that I've been on WP. When I first joined a fought against the deletion of an unremarkable street because my thought was "isn't it amazing that someone can find their *own* street* on Wikipedia! It will inspire editors because if people can find their own street they'll go WOW! and want to join in and add to this remarkable project." Now, more experienced and more cynical, I view Wikipedia as an increasingly large carpet that multitudes want to urinate on... with no growth in the number of cleaners.