[Wikipedia-l] Deletion of /pages/ with No Content

[Ray Saintonge]

The Cunctator wrote:

>
>
>And utility is still a subjective determination. Even in the extreme case,
>one could
>imagine a person for whom the "this is gay" page is useful; say, someone who
>wanted
>proof of anti-homosexual sentiment on the Web, could devise a metric based
>on the
> number of times "this is gay" appears on the Web, or even just on Wikipedia
>in
>general. There is interesting sociological data to be mined in the random
>scribblings of
>anonymous users of Wikipedia.
>
This is stretching things a bit.  "This is gay" written alone on these 
pages rarely has anything to do with homosexuality despite the meaning 
on the face of the expression.  This usage is possibly written by a good 
Christian homophobe whose quality upbringing doesn't allow him to say 
"fucking bullshit".  

I also don't think that an encyclopedia is a place for generating data 
sets intended to be used in sociological experiments.  Perhaps there 
should be something in [What Wikipedia is no] about that.

>I know that when you say "useless" you mean "not helping the stated
>purpose of the Wikipedia project". 
>
Surely, if we were to adopt a policy to delete "useless" pages, we would 
need an understanding of what we mean by "useless"..  To me it adds 
absolutely nothing to the user's knowledge.  If the article [Tucson, 
Arizona] says only, "Tucson is a city in Arizona" it only states what 
the user had to know to be able to look up the city in the first place. 
 Even the concept "city" is implied by Wikipedia naming conventions. 
 Simply changing the content to "Tucson is a city in 'southern' 
Arizona." could put the uselessness in doubt because the word "southern" 
provides an additional fact.
Eclecticology