[WikiEN-l] Webcomics/Deletion again

[David Gerard]

>Why should we have articles on every single Pokemon if they are totally
>unknown outside of the Pokemon community?


* Completeness of coverage is desirable in itself - being able to say
"we have an article on EVERY city, town and hamlet in the US. Yes,
EVERY DAMN ONE."  is a valuable bragging point in itself. If
completeness is *possible* it counts as a mark of quality and/or
potential quality in itself.
* If complete coverage is possible and not hard, it's a hell of a lot
easier and less work to just have articles on it all than setting an
arbitrary bar which then has to be maintained and argued over as
individual topics cross it. (And most of the "notability" markers I've
seen in various areas are in fact arbitrary.) It saves a lot of
pissfighting.

The question is "why shouldn't we?" Please do answer each of these in
turn (and the same for anyone else interested in this debate):

* A lack of resources ... what resources does this waste?
 - Disk space - word from the developers when asked this precise
question is "no."
 - Database/server speed - word from the developers when asked this
precise question is "no."
 - Bandwidth - if the article uses bandwidth, it means people want it.
You know, those "readers" we're supposedly producing this for.
 - Editor time - if they want to write about Cruftemon, they're not
going to write about British history or insects or computer functions
instead if you delete their hard work on Cruftemon articles. They'll
just leave the project.
 - Balance of coverage - you achieve that by filling in what's
missing, not by deleting articles and telling editors their work is
worthless. Also, NO-ONE reads Wikipedia by browsing all articles or
comparing the size of the "computers" volume against the size of the
"molecular biology" volume against the size of the "Cruftemon" volume.
If this was an issue, we'd be deleting most of the computer articles.
Why aren't we doing that? ('Cos that'd be ridiculous. Why would it be
ridiculous?)
 - Reader time - there is already far more Wikipedia than any of us
could ever read all of. So people read things they want to and remain
blissfully unaware of things they don't want to.
 - "Random article" link hits - possibly. (When I joined in late 2003,
1 in 6 articles was a Rambot article on a US town.) Or the function
could be weighted in favour of high-rating articles, when we get a
rating feature.
 - What have I forgotten on this list?
* Vanity articles - third-party verifiability takes care of these
nicely as far as I can see. Arbitrary "notability" bars seem like
unnecessary instruction creep.
* Reputation - it's a common stick to hit Wikipedia with. But the
problem there is that at this stage, every page on Wikipedia should
have a big 1995-style "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" sign on it. We get this
crap because people are looking inside the sausage factory and turning
greenish when they see the actual process. We need to take gentle
guidance from this but otherwise ignore it until we have a genuine
stable version up for critiquing.
*What have I forgotten on this list?

(I should probably put the list above somewhere on the wiki. Suggestions?)


>Right, the problem I see is that people with an "extreme interest" in X
>(you might even call it obsession) think that "all X are equally
>important and Wikipedia should have articles on all of them, including Y
>and Z".
>The problem is, the rest of the X community says "oh, Y and Z are just
>another couple of X's, nothing special". By including Y and Z, we are
>effectively pushing the POV that there is something different about Y
>and Z with respect to all other X.


I see that as setting an artificial barrier to possible completeness
of coverage. Why the hell not cover all we can with verifiability?
What resource are we lacking?

I also don't see your point about "NPOV"  in balance of coverage - as
I note above, 1. you can't enhance coverage of one area by cutting out
work in another area, and 2. no-one browses Wikipedia sequentially or
by weight of area.


>> But your proposal seems an overgeneralisation of a way to use
>> deleting the whole article as a tool to solve *editorial* problems.

>Well, we always have the ability to merge and redirect... I really don't
>understand what you're saying here.


Ah, but many people in the deletion process *insist* that a majority
of "delete" not-a-votes means there shouldn't even be a redirect. Tell
them, not me.


>> The problem there being that many people think an article being
>> deleted means another article on that topic can never be created,
>> ever. (Some even think an article being deleted means its content
>> shouldn't be allowed in new articles anywhere else on the
>> encyclopedia, which I can't make sense of.)

>That's completely wrong...


Again, many people in the deletion process consider that's how it
works and remove material from other articles *because* it was voted
"delete" rather than "merge". Tell them, not me.

Geogre claimed on VFU that "Tony, Snowspinner, and David Gerard have
lately been taking a radical stance on VfU." I boggled at this. I have
from time to time made a point of participating in *every* VFD debate,
and you know, most things that end up on AFD do in fact deserve to die
a quick, messy and hopefully painful death, as absolutely soon as
possible. But these people. Their arguments make knifing people's
babies look like a bad idea or something.


- d.