[WikiEN-l] Inclusionism vs Deletionism

[Steve Bennett]

On 3/7/08, Renata St <renatawiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>  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)."

You're confusing two kinds of "quality".

1) There is the inherent "quality" that a subject brings to an
encyclopaedia. An encyclopaedia full of articles on subjects like
Morocco, Ghandi, and the West Coast Eagles, is supposedly "better"
than an encyclopaedia full of articles on minor TV characters etc.
2) There is the actual "quality" of a given article, regardless of its
subject. An FA is "better" than a stub.

Deleting articles on Pokémon characters might "improve" the
encyclopaedia by definition 1, but would actually make it worse by
definition 2, since all the Pokémon character articles are pretty
good.

Steve