[WikiEN-l] deletionism in popular culture

[Ryan Delaney]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 6:07 AM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
 I'm still not seeing the connection, but I'll try one last time. It sounds
like you're saying that discussion of deletion process distracts us from
working on building new, better articles on topics that we already have, and
that we shouldn't worry too much about deleted content because it probably
wasn't any good anyway. I think there's some logic in this, but it's still
the case that (a) sometimes we ought to take a step back and consider
process from a birds-eye view, or else it will develop chaotically as a
massive cancerous collection of short-term responses to short-term problems
and (b) there is no drawback to pure wiki deletion that we don't already
suffer from the existing system, and it has several considerable advantages
over the status quo.

If you agree with B (and you ought to), then you ought to think that pure
wiki deletion is a good idea. Maybe you don't think it's a good enough idea
to invest the time and energy into getting it implemented (A), but B is
what's really important here-- if enough people subscribe to B, it will find
a way to get done.

- causa sui