[WikiEN-l] deletionism in popular culture

[Charles Matthews]

Ryan Delaney wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Now that's a lovely perennial idea.  There's no point in hard deleting any
>> article save to protect private information in the history.  You can pure
>> wiki delete; or even pure wiki delete and protect the blank page; but
>> removing the work done from view of interested passers-by is wholly
>> unnecessary.
>>
>>
>>     
> I haven't found any persuasive argument against it. Usually the objection is
> "but then there would be edit wars over deletion!"
>   
The main argument is rationalisation: if you ever thought that it was a 
valid idea to rationalise the scope of the project at any point, you'd 
probably start with the thought that with hundreds of thousands of 
articles deleted every year and most of that material being at best 
thoroughly marginal to what we are trying to do, then (you might argue 
that) having it all around is on balance not really helpful. So against 
that you can argue that WP doesn't need rationalisation of any kind: it 
can just go on growing how it likes given the resources. People seem to 
draw their own conclusions on this debate. Mine are based largely on the 
kind of focus or lack of it you see in people who want to search through 
those millions of deleted words, rather than anything else they could be 
trawling through.

Charles