In addition to keeping articles from good editors, we need to find a way to encourage the keeping and improvement from those less skilled, and teaching them in the process.
On 6/18/07, K P kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/18/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 18/06/07, K P kpbotany@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@dunelm.org.uk
I haven't started a lot of articles, maybe 30-50. But many are single line stubs. I haven't had any of them put up for deletion, even the single liners that no one else has ever edited (after one of my stalkers copyedited, of course). The pictures always get edited (although my image editor is currently on vacation), and they often get categorized, and they get linked to, because they're organisms that get linked to their family or families to their orders or to their phyla or divisions, but they don't get prodded or AfDed. I did start some as an anon IP also, and none of those were deleted.
KP
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