[WikiEN-l] deletionism in popular culture

[Charles Matthews]

Ian Woollard wrote:
> Yes, but some of those really bad articles will become good articles
> if you spend enough time on them.
>
> Deletion short-circuits that.
>
> In a perfect world, with perfect AFDs it wouldn't matter. In the real
> world, with real world AFDs it does.
>   
Yes, but (I say) the solution to that is not to keep all deleted 
material forever on the site. There are clearly people who feel that 
this _is_ the solution, but I'm not one of them. It may be a weakness of 
AfD that deletions do occur, not because the topic is unsuitable for the 
encyclopedia (which, let us not  forget, remains the main reason for 
deleting an article), but because the article is not in great shape. But 
the way to fix up that weakness is not permanent public storage of stuff 
that really is mostly junk.

Charles