Long post ahead, but constructive suggestions at the bottom :)
On 7/14/07, Mark Gallagher fuddlemark@gmail.com wrote:
G'day Ben,
Exactly -- this is not an inclusionist project (and certainly not a "radically inclusionist" one); it has nothing to say about what topics should be included and what should not. It is about improving articles about topics that are uncontroversially encyclopedic and includable because lately some people have been deleting them.
See Andrew Lih on the topic (and you don't see him pissed off very often):
http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/2007/07/10/unwanted-new-articles-in-wikipedia/
He makes a good point late in his post about the changing attitudes to inclusion/deletion: newbies are far more deletionist, and further, do so without any real clue of what they're talking about.
I have become more inclusionist over time. However, the community --- by which I mean the squeaky wheels --- have moved much further back than I've moved forward, so that it now seems that I am massively out of step. I've noticed that a lot of the old-timers whom I respect have seen their attitudes shift similar amounts relative to "the community".
I think this is often true -- a personal shift towards inclusionism the longer one is around -- and I wonder why. Is it because the longer one is around the more articles you're likely to see that you care about that have been deleted unnecessarily (e.g. Andrew's examples, where as a long-time contributor he is shocked to find that articles he knows are notable have been deleted?)
Or is it because you're more likely to have your own work deleted? (I just noticed that an article of mine had been prodded back in Nov. '06; I wasn't checking my watchlist at the time of deletion, and there was no notification on my talk page, so I didn't notice at the time. I can give you half a dozen reasons why the topic was notable, and I'm sure I had extensive references. I left a polite note for the deleting admin asking what the reason was on the prod, and am waiting to hear back.)
Or is it simply that the longer one is around the longer a timescale you have to see how articles can change and improve over time? From what I can see, the idea that "Wikipedia is not a race" seems to have gotten lost in many cases; I see people complaining when speedy deletions aren't taken care of in hours, for instance, which is just silly. Eventualism may win in the end (it always does!) but it's certainly not well represented in small, every-day debates.
The middle example concerns me the most, actually -- not for my sake, but for the sake of casual contributors. If I see a deleted article with a history of "expired prod deleted by xxxx", I know exactly what that means. I know the article was probably tagged by some well-meaning editor who didn't think to notify me; no one else checked it, and the prod expired; and it was deleted somewhat mechanically by the admin. I know that I can leave some polite notes in various places, or else call on one of my admin friends, to at least look at the history and tell me what was up. I know that I can probably defend having it recreated because I have good sources and am confident in my ability to interpret content policies. (Does DRV apply to prods? would a recreation of the article with more sources be summarily deleted as a recreation? I'm not sure on these points, but I think I could figure it out and defend myself). I think that I even still have my notes in my userspace for that article. In other words: it's a pain in the neck, but I know approximately what's going on.
Expecting a casual contributor who sees their (notable! sourced!) article mysteriously deleted to know what is going on, and to not get completely burned out on Wikipedia and even angry when this happens, is probably expecting too much. All the talk page welcome messages we give out point people to the really basic core principles -- NPOV, V, NOR and civility, and sometimes even tell the newbie to "be bold" -- but they don't say a word about what to do when you think you've followed all these principles and someone else with more power (because they're an admin, or they know policy inside and out) disagrees with you and takes issue with your work. In other words, the standards that the "regulars" consider important -- "does it follow subsection a) of policy B4? it does? I guess we can delete it then" are sometimes *very very different* from the polices and practices we proclaim to the rest of the world and our newbie editors as being important, and therein lies the rub.
To go towards fixing this, we should make notifying the original author about deletions mandatory; we should hold admins to a higher standard in writing descriptive edit summaries when they delete an article; we should encourage *all* regular editors to review prods and afds (not just the "afd regulars"); we should rewrite the help pages on deletion so it is *really obvious* what is going on (since that is where normal people get sent, and the pages are a clusterfuck of contradictory documentation currently); and we should seriously consider a proposal like SJ's where articles are shunted into a "what do we do with this" queue instead of automatically going to deletion when there are serious concerns.
best, phoebe