[WikiEN-l] deletionism in popular culture

[Charles Matthews]

Ryan Delaney wrote
>
> This is coming into focus a bit, but how, specifically, do you think 
> this relates to pure wiki deletion?
[[Wikipedia:Pure wiki deletion system]] says various things, including 
that it is unclear why deletion is not reversible. (I'd say that is 
clear enough.)

But however you formulate the discussion about blanking pages versus 
deletion, what you end up talking about is various databases within the 
database. The current "solution" is roughly that there are a public 
database "articles for creation" that is held outside the main 
namespace, and a database of deleted pages (histories in some cases 
purged by the OverSight tool) accessible by admins. My comment really 
was that if we had the further "database" of some millions of "blanked" 
pages, most of which was admittedly junk, and some of which would 
certainly be at least as troubling for BLP reasons as the live pages 
considering that it might concern many thousands of people who are not 
"notable" and yet about whom we make postings available, we might be 
having the discussion the other way round: wouldn't it just be easier to 
concentrate on what we are good at, making encyclopedia articles on 
topics that can support them?

We now live on Wikipedia, I think, with a fuller consciousness of our 
finite if very large human resources, and (at least as I see it) the 
"pure wiki" approach is mainly a distraction from the mission "write the 
encyclopedia". Hence my use of the term "rationalisation" for the 
attitude that we should very much focus on the core mission.

Charles