[WikiEN-l] Inclusionism vs Deletionism

[White Cat]

I consider the following a reasonable read on the topic. Well you can listen
too...

http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/05/wikipedia_is_ju.html

*Wikipedia 1.0 team* had drafted the following metric of quality for
articles on wikipedia. This is merely a quality standard, it was never meant
to be a notability/inclusion/deletion standard.

   - Articles start as stubs meaning they contain very little information
   (one or two sentences) on the topic.
   - Over time articles become "start class" articles meaning there is
   something like a paragraph in the article.
   - Over time articles are promoted to a "b-class" article - several
   paragraphs of information
   - Over time articles become "good articles" meaning they now comply
   with the good article standard.
   - Over time articles become "a-class" meaning articles have a quality
   better that Good article standard but less than "featured" standard
   - Over time articles become "featured" meaning they comply with the
   highest written standard on wikipedia.

Is this "featured" standard an upper limit? No it is not. It is a dynamic
lower limit. Featured standard was raised over time. Hence why articles are
demoted.

All non-featured articles have some sort of problem with them. They violate
many guidelines and unless someone fixes such violations of guidelines such
articles never become of featured standard. Of course it is possible to fix
such violations by deleting articles in violation, but that is not a desired
solution. Shooting the patient will cure all symptoms. But the objective is
saving the patient not curing the disease.

All non-featured articles will not be included in the Wikipedia 1.0 edition.
In other words out of the two million plus articles currently there are only
about two thousand that will be on 1.0. This is regardless of the
deletionist or inclusionist efforts.

Also the problem was never restricted on pop-culture related articles.
Townships, highways, and other real-world topics are also undergoing the
same issues pop-culture related articles are facing. Such articles are also
mercilessly redirectified. There are undeveloped articles on former US vice
presidents for example. No one is redirectifying them right now but in the
near future such a thing would not surprise me.

Should we have an article on every high school, highway and township? I
cannot say. What I know is something we should avoid like plague:
non-discussion mass removal of all such articles which is what is happening.
There is a reason why non-consensus is a default keep.

Instead of trying to delete 20,000 poorly written articles, people should
try fixing one problematic article. That would be a novelty.

I think the problem is not much of a inclusionism versus deletionism but
more of a few "deletionists" that are not acting based on consensus.

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 7:52 AM, 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)
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