I think people need to realise that deleting something does not improve WP. On the other hand, re-writing an article does improve WP. I imagine people prefer deletion because it is easier or because they enjoy "being a cop".

Come on. This works both ways.

1) Deleting something certainly _can_ improve Wikipedia. Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia. The apocryphal story is that when Michelangelo was asked to explain how he carved a sculpture, he said "I just cut away anything that doesn't look like David." To remould Wikipedia nearer to our heart's desire, we must do two things. We must add anything that look like an encyclopedia _and_ we must _also_ cut away anything that doesn't look like an encyclopedia.

2) Writing an article is virtuous and hard work. So is fact-checking an article. So is significantly expanding an article. So is copy-editing an article. So is finding public-domain images to add to an article.

3) Deleting the right things can help Wikipedia. But compared to 2), it doesn't help Wikipedia very _much._ And some deletions do hurt Wikipedia.

4) I don't think the fatal attraction of deletion is that people enjoy "being a cop." I think the attracton is that VfD has about the right amount of traffic, social interaction, conflict, drama, winning and losing to be addictive. I can write whole articles without getting a single "attaboy," but almost everything I do in VfD gets interesting positive and/or negative responses.

5) The opposite side of deletion is stub creation. This is just the same as deletion, in reverse. Good stubs can help Wikipedia, but they don't help Wikipedia as much as the activities mentioned (2) above, and a lot of them have zero or slightly negative value. But creating a new article has an instant-gratification factor. How else can you explain the fact that people would rather create eighteen substubs than a single article with eighteen short sections?

Deletions aren't always good. Deletions aren't always bad. Stubs aren't always good. Stubs aren't always bad. Nothing hard to understand about any of that. Neither of these activities is as virtuous as writing articles. But both of them can sometimes be more fun.

-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/