At 06:56 PM 8/25/02 -0700, Karl wrote:
--- "Michael R. Irwin" mri_icboise@surfbest.net wrote:
I think that having the Wikipedia Guard or Militia routinely deleting empty good titled articles may only slow down the growth in bread and depth of the Wikipedia. Some people may like organizing the link structures and establishing good initial titles and interconnections. Why should this contribution be routinely deleted? How much subsequent work is then lost from contributors who while browsing may choose to add an easy paragraph but who will not undertake an entire stub and the effort required to link it appropriately into an entire encyclopedia?
It is interesting that the debate about article deletion turns on the contributing habits of other people, not ourselves. Do any of us go around creating poor stubs, content-free articles, or other stuff that is a candidate for deletion? It seems not, i.e. it seems that nobody on the mailing list is suggesting deleting any article created by anyone else on the mailing list. Apparently, no matter how varied in substance and style our contributions may be, we all recognize that we are all doing useful work.
Actually, I'd favor deleting some of Fredbauder's stubs, since I think entries like "a large city in southern Arizona" as the entire article reduce the chance of anyone seeing the gap and writing a good article on the subject.
<snip some good discussion of timing and the effect on new contributors of having articles edited rather than removed>