2009/8/11 James Forrester <james(a)jdforrester.org>rg>:
From my (archaic? ;-)) relatively inclusionist PoV
(the specific
'camp' with which I most closely identified/y was "eventualism"), I
consider the prevailing attitude on enwiki to be rather more
deletionist than it was in the "early days" ('02-'04); the 2005-6
period was considerably more deleitionist still, certainly, and we've
relented from that to an extent, but mostly in the form of subject
beach-heads combined with draconian rules for the unwary (the CSAs in
particular); I feel that the enwiki community at large is slowly
drifting further towards the inclusionist mentality, but at the same
time, away from the eventualist PoV, which the CSAs undermines.
I think that is an excellent summary of the situation (although I have
no idea what a CSA is...). I wasn't very active during the early days,
but from what I did see you seem to be right - it was very much an
"anything goes" culture. Then we started to get noticed and people
took reputation more seriously and I think that is what started the
move towards deletionism. I think we're moving back away from that now
because most of the really important articles have already been
written so one reason to complain about less important articles no
longer applies - we aren't writing them at the expense of more
important articles to the same extent (not that that argument was
every particularly good - often you just lose contributors by deleting
their articles, you don't get them to write something else instead). I
think the move away from eventualism is because people start reading
our articles almost straight away now, so we can't just ignore the
current state of articles. I have some eventualist tendencies and I've
noticed them reducing over the last couple of years - I think these
days no article actually is better than a bad article.
A proper consideration of this multi-dimensionality
could be
interesting for community members, but (a) difficult to put across,
and (b) not necessarily as interesting, to outsiders.
Yes, I fear the BBC story is going to over simplify the issues in
order to keep outsiders interested and to allow them to understand it.
If they do find a "passionate Deletionist" then they will have
somebody very much on the fringe of the community.