On May 2, 2006, at 2:14 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
My point was that many people, including (apparently) myself and the person who started this entire thread, never knew that "cruft" had any meaning *apart from* "not suitable for inclusion in the encyclopedia due to limited scope of interest"
I know a certain racial epithet which is perfectly synonymous with some much nicer terms. You understand why we don't use the racial epithet.
Racial epithets, by definition, are *not* perfectly synonymous with nicer terms because they have unnecessarily negative connotations. Let's not mince words. If you call someone a nigger, you're implying that their race makes them less valuable as a human being. If you call someone black, all you're implying is that they happen to be of African descent.
The only connotation "cruft" has is that we take a dismissive view towards material that's not suitable for inclusion due to limited interest. But this dismissive attitude is already present because we're vouching for the deletion of this material in the first place.
According to Wikipedia, "In hacker jargon, cruft refers to extraneous or low-quality things in general, or software code in particular." Most of the content labeled "cruft" in AFD disputes is indeed extraneous and low-quality. I don't see how calling something "extraneous and low-quality" is in any way less insulting than calling it "cruft". In fact, "extraneous and low-quality" is even more devastating to a newbie than a technical term they may not fully understand and only pick up the meaning via context.
"Cruft may also refer to useless junk or excess materials (including obsolete computer hardware) that build up over time and have no value." Cruft is also used in this sense, when we talk about cleaning cruft out of an article. Things like trivia sections and external links certainly display this property as well.
We delete things from Wikipedia because those things often are not suitable for inclusion due to limited interest, extraneous, low- quality, or because they build up over time and have no value. I'm a big fan of civility, but I'm an even bigger fan of honesty. Wikipedia has cruft, and when we delete it, we delete it because it is cruft. Calling it "cruft" is, at worst, question-begging (because cruft, by definition, is worthy of deletion--saying something's worthy of deletion as an argument for its deletion-worthiness is question- begging).
Is it offensive to call it "cruft"? No offensive than vouching for its deletion. I guess we should abolish deletion for the same reason saying "cruft" should be a thoughtcrime.