[WikiEN-l] Re: VfD is broken

[Timwi]

John Lee wrote:

>> 4. Articles about "non-notable" stuff does not hurt Wikipedia. Since 
>> noone cares about the stuff, noone will link to it and noone will 
>> search for it and NOONE will ever see it!
> 
> A keyword search can easily bring up non-notable articles. When somebody 
> sees an entry resembling a blog posting, what will they think of Wikipedia?

They will think "Whee! There's stuff to improve!" and become a contributor.

> If it's a notable article, it will be improved anyway.

An article goes through VfD for how long? 5 days? 7 days? Hardly enough 
to give people time to improve a bad article on an obscure topic.

> Honestly, if I had to pick between deleting a 
> (hypothetical) article on Ronald Reagan which is full of unrelated 
> nonsense about doing drugs or keeping it in the hopes somebody would 
> improve it, I'd do the former without skipping a beat.

Of course, that is an extreme example. How about Anthere's recent example:

	The '''medlar''' is a [[fruit]].

Admittedly, this article is:
* short
* incomplete

However, it is also:
* factually accurate
* NPOV
* actually something I didn't know!

Hence, it is useful.

> Having an article only gives the impression to readers that we tolerate junk.

Which is good.  If we give the impression to readers that we tolerate 
only full-grown complete articles, we will detract contributors who are 
perhaps not quite as good a writer as they would like to be.

> I'd rather 
> receive complaints from readers that we don't have an article on Ronald 
> Reagan than complaints that our article of Ronald Reagan is useless, 
> which in turn will lead to questioning the credibility of other innocent 
> articles.

The missing of an article on Ronald Reagan would similarly lead to 
questioning the completeness of other innocent articles.

Now, please don't get me wrong; I am not a complete inclusionist, 
either.  For example, I too don't think it would make sense to have a 
separate article on every single school anyone ever went to. However, I 
have been wanting to contribute to advanced topics in Computation Theory 
and Complexity Theory, but have been a bit hesitant to do so because 
some of the things I want to write about would start out as simple stubs 
and risk being deleted.

Timwi