[WikiEN-l] Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary

[David Gerard]

2009/8/12 Cathy Edwards <Cathy.Edwards at bbc.co.uk>:

>> To add to and enrich the programme we'd really love to interview a UK
>> Wikipedian. We're looking for a passionate Deletionist - someone who
>> identifies with the goals of Deletionism to create a high quality
>> encyclopaedia, and does a lot of this kind of quality control
>> themselves - perhaps someone who is a member of the Association of
>> Deletionist Wikipedians.


Does such a person actually exist, self-identified? It appears from
similar discussion on wikimediauk-l that it doesn't, in fact.

(I suspect some corners of the media won't care, and we actually
considered picking someone to claim to be a "deletionist" and go on
programmes talking sense instead. This is an eample of the interests
of the media *not* being the interests of the encylcopedia at al, and
us having to work around that.)

Some seem to call others "deletionists" for deleting stuff that they
don't like. But as someone who's generally fairly inclusionist (and
has been called a "radical inclusionist" and gone "wtf" at the
notion), I can tell you that reviewing 24 hours of
[[Special:Newpages]] will convince you that lots of pages deserve
death by cleansing fire as absolutely quickly as possible.

So we're talking about increasingly fine gradations. And basically,
the media has seized upon this as an interesting and story-worthy idea
about four or five years after anyone actually working on Wikipedia
cared.


- d.