Inclusionism and deletionism are a spectrum not a binary choice, wherever you are on that spectrum there will be editors who are more deletionist or more inclusionist than yourself. The closer you are to one end of the spectrum the more likely it is that you will think that the other end of the spectrum is dominant. Which is a longwinded way of sadly saying no, in fact it's very much the opposite. Deletion debates generally attract deletionists, especially as the inclusionists have to take more time the more potential sources they can check. WSC On 22 March 2012 19:20, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il>wrote;wrote:

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 11:52 PM, Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org> wrote: Well, there is currently an AfD in progress that is looking a bit like a train wreck, so some do still split the community. Though the issue is more BLP than notability (though notability is borderline). I'm tempted to actually formalise the proposal I've had floating around for a while (in my head) to say that BLPs and (biographical articles in general) should require published biographies during the person's lifetime and/or obituaries after death. Would anyone on this mailing list be willing to bounce ideas around about that? The sticking point is what constitutes a 'published biography'? Carcharoth

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 12:44 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: Really? What about this proposal? "In light of such examples, I think it’s high time to start a discussion on whether to amend Wikipedia’s BLP policy as follows: *WP contributors will not start biographies on lesser-known living people without their permission. The project is full of three-sentence stubs on people of minor notability, more often than not started by contributors eager to increase their number of “articles created”. *If a lesser-known biographical subject wants their WP biography deleted, their request will be honored. The biographical information for this subject will be replaced with a template stating something along the lines of: "We regret that Ms/Mrs/Mr X decided not to have his biography featured on WP. For further information, please consult their website." That was from User:DracoEssentialis (12:00, 23 March 2012 (UTC)). I'm also going to post what I proposed at that AfD, but I'll do that in another thread. Carcharoth

A living person should have the right to request and get deletion of a sketchy biography. However, often full biographical details of someone who is clearly notable not only are seldom available, but also not of any particular value to the reader. Attempts to fill them in based on sketchy information do not give happy results. It is what they did that is notable that we have information about. Fred

There is a good body research around who participates in deletion discussions (particularlyin the English Wikipedia). These studies mostly looked at the breakdown by tenure [1] or diversity of participants in AfD discussions or the effects of the size of a discussion on its outcome [2]) In [3] we looked specifically at evidence of heterogeneity in AfD discussions indicating participation by deletionists or inclusionists. We found two classes of users who participate in significantly different ways in these discussions (such that their !voting behavior is poorly predicted by the baseline probability of an average AfD participants, but is predicted much more accurately by the typical profile of editors with a "deletion" or "inclusion" tendency). We had no data available to determine whether these AfD participants who consistently voted for keeping or deleting AfD-nominated pages did so because of some kind of !vote stacking via organized action or because of a natural tendency towards one of these two stances on deletion. Dario [1] Geiger, R. S., & Ford, H. (2011). Participation in Wikipedia’s article deletion processes. Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration - WikiSym ’11 (p. 201). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2038558.2038593 - http://www.wikisym.org/ws2011/_media/proceedings:p201-geiger.pdf [2] Lam, S. K., Karim, J., & Riedl, J. (2010). The effects of group composition on decision quality in a social production community. Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work - GROUP ’10 (p. 55). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1880071.1880083 - http://www.grouplens.org/system/files/Lam+Wikipedia+Group+Discussion.pdf [3] Taraborelli, D., & Ciampaglia, G. L. (2010). Beyond Notability. Collective Deliberation on Content Inclusion in Wikipedia. 2010 Fourth IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems Workshop (pp. 122-125). Budapest: IEEE. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/SASOW.2010.26 - http://nitens.org/docs/qteso10.pdf On Mar 22, 2012, at 12:38 PM, Alan Liefting wrote: