[WikiEN-l] Defeat: Notability is Policy

[John Lee]

On Feb 1, 2008 10:28 PM, Steven Walling <steven.walling at gmail.com> wrote:
> >actively destroying much of the information that was aggregated into it
>
> You're talking about the unreferenced, un-useful and embarrassing
> information that was aggregated in to it. Those of you who keep railing
> about the "evil trend of deletionism" convienently forget that much of the
> deleted articles are in direct violation of policies that have nothing to do
> with notability.

I'm aghast at the general direction this thread seems to be taking, a
direction quite well-summarised by your email. Unreferenced !=
unuseful != embarrassing. I've deleted hundreds if not thousands of
articles, but deletionism has been taken to a degree that I don't
think any of us original deletionists imagined it would be.

My first thought when I read the initial email was "Wait, this is what
the inclusionists used to demand - a codified policy on what we should
delete based on verifiability as opposed to notability." But from the
emails in this thread, it seems that this policy is going to be
interpreted in a ludicrous way.

Wikipedia is a work in progress. We should not expect articles to be
perfect or complete, and that extends to citations. So we have some
unreferenced material. Cry me a fucking river. The only unreferenced
material that should concern is that which is potentially
controversial or otherwise could land us in a pile of deep shit.

There are of course good intentions behind this policy, but I see no
reason to fix something that isn't broken. We're already getting rid
of articles about garage bands and other worthless pieces of crap, and
even then, only "much" of the deleted articles are actually this bad,
going by *your* words. The present guidelines are already working to
throw out the worthless material submitted to us. Why do we need to
fix something that isn't broken, and thereby now make articles on
obscure third world politicians or obscure third world brands of
instant noodles verboten, all for the sake of cackling at some stupid
garage band's lack of verifiability/notability?

I might be okay with this policy if everyone else read it the same way
I would - that unverifiable, controversial information should be
deleted, and that depending on the situation, unverifiable information
can also be deleted. But it seems clear to me that the hordes of
morons who now call themselves deletionists want anything unverifiable
deleted, and don't care that they haven't presented much of a coherent
case for changing a policy that is already accomplishing their own
stated goals, and that is already, according to them, throwing out
material that might not be so shitty.

Johnleemk