On 18/06/07, K P <kpbotany(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Sadly adding new topics becomes not a drive to add
them, but more time
spent trying to keep them, then it takes to actually enter and write
them. (...) Inappropriate deletion creates time, it diverts people's
energies from what interests them, what brought them to Wikipedia in
the first place, and forces them to "save" articles that should be in
Wikipedia.
I know I only ever seem to reply to you when you talk about
deletionism, but it occurs to me I've never brought up my experience.
I spent a lot of my on-wiki time of the first half of the year
churning out a large set of stubby "framework articles" on various
topics; nothing remarkable, a couple of sentences each and a reference
and some categories. I was, at times, turning out ten an hour. A lot
of them even *I* consider borderline significant - we're talking
"obscure Victorian statutes" here.
I got one nomination for deletion - a mistaken speedy from someone who
was confused about a disambiguation page (well, duh, of *course* it
had no content). Looking through the list I keep in userspace, maybe
three have been nominated for deletion, and two were kept - the third
was a decision I don't agree with, but it fit with an existing line of
consensus dating back quite a while. One got politely queried - so I
explained thier significance better - and one got merged into a larger
page, where it was arguably more useful anyway.
So, you know, there's my anecdote, just to balance all these tales of
woe. I'm running at maybe 1% of articles challenged for inclusion, and
only a fraction of those removed. Maybe I get deference (but I doubt
it); maybe I just have the knack of making things look "right" in
their first draft; maybe my working hours are less 'dangerous' than
yours. But I don't meet a piranha tank of deletion; I create and
watchlist and forget, and they sit there for months.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk