[Wikipedia-l] Entries for deletion.... issues from the ThirdWorld

[Marek Najmajer]

I've been reading some of your meassages or votes for entry deletion, and 
I'm getting more and more sad.

You are trying to have a 'clean' worthfull encyclopaedia with assurance 
there is no meaningless article in it.
It could be understood in case of written, printed book which looks great in 
the bookshelf (I like books anyway).

But deletion of entire entries only because they are not so wide known?
Wait a moment!
It's against spirit and rationale od Wikipedia!

I can present you my own list of drivers which, I hope, stimulated people to 
support Wikipedia:
Here you have it:
    1. to have free (no cost) source of information,
    2. to work out bias and antagonisms in different national, religious, 
cultural, philosophical perspectives (in the wake of NPOV),
    3. to have much wider scope of entries (with no limits of printing, 
publishing and paper and timber production - greens beware!),
    4. to have more fresh infos before it was even printed in newspapers,

Recapitulating, the corner stone of quality and the competitive edge of 
Wikipedia as a whole is:
    * early delivery,
    * different perspectives,
    * market verification,
    * wider scope.

Now some of you are trying to make Wikipedia a digital representation of 
printed encyclopaedias. Balanced and highly representative.
Great apetite and the results...? The results are at no surprise rather 
mediocre. Wikipedia is not of the same level of quality as printed 
Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Cleaning-oriented Wikipedians are focusing only on the first driver I've 
mentioned hereinbefore. They want to have it for free and still of the 
highest quality.
Why it falls short expectations.
Because it is only a try to transfer _old paper paradigm_ to completely 
different _opensource digital world_, where there are no more constraints 
of:
* paper and printing costs,
* costs of scalability od delivery,
* difficulties in searching,
* cost barriers of royalties.

Instead, we need - in my opinion - to exploit in whole new possibilities of 
this new 'brave' model of knowledge sharing and diffusion.

If I remember, this discussion started with issues from the Third World.
Someone has counted entries from different countries and someone another 
analized it and shouted:
"Wait a moment! It's a discrimination of the Third World! There is so great 
overrepresentation of the developed countries."
Yes, indeed, this analyst was right.
But... What solutions were proposed?

Here you have a proposal: "In order to balance representations of different 
nations and cultures, we will delete some articles."
I hope I misunderstood it!
If unfortunately not, it could be awful act of vadalism of voluntary work of 
millions Wikipedians. Once again a kind of affirmative action or 'positive 
discrimination' at cost of the whole community.

I think problem solution should be carefully adjusted to solve the root 
cause. So:
* If you want to support entries from the Third World, do support creating 
and editing new articles from these area.
* If you want to have a highly balanced set of high quality entries to 
compete with printed Encyclopaedias, find some way to promote quality 
(featured arcticle is an excellent step in this direction). Maybe the next 
step would be creating more elaborate quality hierarchy and some new 
features for quality demanding internauts like searching entries within some 
quality criteria.

Maybe I'm trying here to invent gunpowder but in my opinion:
*The power of Wikipedia is to expand*
To expand: in member count, in scope, in presentation form (maps, semantic 
taxonomies, graphical searching)

There are so many entries to create and so many issues to solve (ideological 
battles).
Deletion of articles which looks like of little meaning is of least 
importance.

Best regards,
Marqoz