I think an increasing use of deletion is a natural response to the growth in wikipedia, which as it takes shape as a serious encyclopedia, has evolving boundaries and an envolving concept of what it is all about. Things that were crap were tolerated in the hope that /someday/ their saviour would come and rescue them and make them encyclopedic. But the higher the standards achieved now as wikipedia grows, the more articles once tolerated as passable (ie not hideously bad, just bad) fall off the edge and are seen as simply not good enough. So growing deletion of substandard articles is a natural part of the evolution of wikipedia from early draft encyclopedia to real attempt to create a real encyclopedic text. Given all that, I do think deletion has for some users become a first response, not the last, which it should be. All too many articles are being put on wikipedia's VfD page because /one/ person has a problem with them or doesn't know anything about them. (A classic example was the proposed deletion of an article on a famous one-time winner of the World Snooker championships, someone known to millions worldwide but simply not known to Americans, therefore thought of as not warranting a page. Though to be fair, the proposer of this ludicrous deletion did realise from the laughter of the rest of the world that he had made a mistake. Not all proposers of loopy deletions accept that they made a mistake and crusade to delete perfectly fine articles simply because /they/ don't accept the article. The Cunctator's idea that if one person opposed a deletion it should be stopped is farcical. Wikipedia does have a few people whose contribution to debates are 'whatever everyone else wants, I oppose just to be different'. If someone wrote an article [[Adolf Hitler was a nun]] the same small group would be out on the barricades defending it just to be different. They see wikipedia as some sort of game to wage extremist agendas, whether political, ideological or analytical. The rules being followed where high-threshholds are required for deletion (2/3 etc) are sensible and don't allow the 'watch me cause trouble' brigade to force wikipedia to keep nutty, absurd ridiculous articles, often through false names being created to allow multiple votes. As to the victims of 9/11, there is not one iota of justification for keeping these articles on wikipedia. What happened on 9/11 was horrible, disgusting and outrageous, but wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a shrine. The US suffered a horrible experience but so have many nations and peoples have had just as horrific experiences, many indeed far far worse (the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Vietnam, the Hundred Years War, two World Wars, etc). Articles based on the Irish War of Independence that covered individuals murdered by the British or the IRA, ('Mickey O'Brien was a good man and father'; 'Sir Laurence O'Keeffe was a kind employer and father', etc) would deservedly be binned. America's traumatic experiences in /one/ series of incidents, which by world standards has a relatively small death toll, cannot be given 'special' treatment no matter how emotionally traumatic the impact on the US and its psyche. This is a world encyclopedia, not an American one, and cannot treat the life of one US victim as more worthy of attention than a Palestinian victim, an Israeli victim, a Holocaust victim, an Irish victim, a British victim, a Somali victim, a Chilean victim, etc. These pages give the impression that US victims are somehow /more important/ and in a special league to every other. JT _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail