[WikiEN-l] Inclusionism vs Deletionism

[michael west]

On 07/03/2008, Renata St <renatawiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> After NY Book review & Economist articles I have been thinking...
>
> The debate I vs D became so prominent after Wikipedia decided to focus not
> on quantity, but rather on quality (when it dawned to people that in 2M+
> articles we don't even have 2k featured articles) and require citations
> for
> everything. It's not a bad thing in itself... but then it turned into
> "instead of improving articles, let me delete the worst kind of articles -
> Pokemon characters, TV episodes, bands, etc. That way I will improve
> Wikipedia's quality not by adding something better, but by subtracting
> something worse than the average (or the desired standard)."
>
> Isn't this what's happening now?
>
> [For those who think in math: you can increase the average of [-3; 0; 4;
> 5;
> 9] to 6 by either adding 1 to each number (i.e. expanding/cleaning up each
> article) of by deleting -3 and 0... so which set would be better [-2; 1;
> 5;
> 6; 10]  or [4; 5; 9]? the questions is not which one is easier...]
>
> Sincerely,
> Renata3 (a deletionist going through a faith crisis)


If we are going to label ourselves, I would call myself an "Inclusionist
with reservations".  The problem with all out inclusionism is that if you
are going to defend an article in Afd is that to prove its worth keeping one
has to get out and source and rewrite sections.

Most articles are never going to become featured articles or for that matter
Good Articles. Keeping articles on every High School (or this weeks small
Afd purge on British University Students' Unions) means that in order to
keep them from the cull they have to be sourced and updated.

Surely this distracts "all-rounder" editors from articles that have a better
chance of gaining FA or GA standard?

I have sympathy witha lot of new editors who think that there articles
should be included.  Many of them provide sources from local newspapers but
its hard to defend them at Afd.  During the past year, I've started
explaining that its much easier to get something up on Wikia (particulary
Arts or Music), working on good copy and sources and reviewing every once in
a while whether or not an article will meet the critera for Wikipedia.

All articles have merits, but if the loss of some articles which need so
much work and sourcing to make them even passable certainly distracts
editors.

Mike - (inclusionist with reservations)