[WikiEN-l] Inclusionists vs deletionists

[Ken Arromdee]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2012, Carcharoth wrote:
> *WP contributors will not start biographies on lesser-known living
> people without their permission. The project is full of three-sentence
> stubs on people of minor notability, more often than not started by
> contributors eager to increase their number of “articles created”.

In the Did You Know discussion, someone brought up the possibility that a
an inappropriate DYK (about a recent murder victim's body) was created
to increase a user's Wikicup.  I hadn't even heard of Wikicup, and when I
checked it out it seemed like trouble waiting to happen.

When you have an Xbox or Playstation game and people get Achievements on it,
that's relatively harmless.  Nobody cares if someone goes around trying to
beat a monster in under 30 seconds in order to gain a bunch of ultimately
useless points.  (Though even then there have been cases where achievements
disrupted multiplayer games.)  But when you have a similar system on
Wikipedia, you end up encouraging activity that would be considered OCD in
other contexts.  Regardless of how useless the points are, you have people
concentrating more on points than on doing what Wikipedia is meant to do.

Wikipedia is not an online multiplayer game, and it shouldn't encourage
people to treat it as one.  It shouldn't have scores, and it shouldn't judge
contributors in ways that encourage treating it like it has scores.