[WikiEN-l] Deletion for its own sake (was MUD history)

[Steve Summit]

Philip Sandifer wrote:
> On Jan 11, 2009, at 8:56 PM, David Gerard wrote:
>> ...If they don't believe a given item can have reliable sources -
>> the sort of rabid nutters who brag about deletion tallies on their
> user pages - then they just won't accept anything.
>
> This has been one of the most toxic things I've seen in a long time,  
> and it's a real problem. In the Threshold debate, I have seen...

I am an avid inclusionist; I am no deletionist.
I am a fan of MUDs, having played and written them.
I am not a rabid nutter, nor an apologist for same.
But I just took a look at [[Threshold (online game)]]
for the first time, and y'know, it's marginal.

I bring this up *not* to suggest that the article deserves
deletion.  But a reasonable person could reasonably conclude,
based on reasonably-written notability and sourcing policies,
that this article did not quite make the cut.  If it's "obviously"
"reasonable" for this article to be kept, I suspect our notability
and sourcing policies would need a significant amount of relaxing
in order to make that conclusion unambiguously clear.

Currently (and aside from any ministrations by rabid nutters),
our notability and sourcing policies are rather carefully
designed to exclude cruft which obviously, reasonably does
not belong in the encyclopedia.  If they then "wrongly" suggest
deleting this article, what we have is another nice example that
what's obvious and reasonable to one person is not to another.
And Wikipedia is long since big enough for these differences
of opinion to occur.