User:.Tom.

Always the same old question of "what to put on your user page"?

If you came here, you most likely came here through an AfD page, because ever since I've realized how stupid and prone to abuse some parts of the deletion policy are, you should know my stand on this:


 * Wikipedia is not a book encyclopedia, and not limited by "pages need printing" or "books must fit into book shelf". There is no reason to delete content from Wikipedia to "keep it small".
 * "Notability" deletes are almost always veiled "keep it small" arguments. So what if only 1000 people on the planet care? What is your loss if a page you'll never visit exists?
 * I'm especially opposed to the "no offline sources" argument. Magazines, newspapers, radio and television stations - every media is moving online. A lot of things are happening purely online. Requiring offline sources for a web service, web page or online game is stupid and puts the bar too high for non-mainstream stuff. The very stuff people search on Wikipedia - you don't need Wikipedia to know what Google is.
 * Way too many people comment on AfD while having no knowledge about the subject in question at all. In some examples they didn't even read the article that they ask to be deleted.
 * I hate vandalism, hoax and spam pages. These are reasons for speedy deletion, and pretty much the only reasons.
 * Aside from that, I agree with all arguments from "arguments against deleting articles"

There is also something else that deeply bugs me about deletions:
 * They are a total violation of the Wiki spirit. You lose the history, you can't check what's come before, who did what when, you can't reverse or undo. In short, everything that a Wiki is all about, deletion is not.

However, the deletionists are winning the edit wars, mostly because it simply takes less effort to get a page deleted than it does to either create it in the first place, or get it restored.

So, in summary, I'm not wasting more time, energy and emotions on this, I'm taking those over to Citizendium, see you there.

PS: And yes, the fact that both BattleMaster and Tom Vogt were deleted (both despite surviving prior AfDs) does play a role. There are some good arguments in the AfDs for both, on both sides. My game isn't famous like WoW and I'm not a celebrity - but if a book published by the German Research Network (which is the .org that runs the entire network for all german universities, you know) is removed as a source because it's not listed in SCHOLAR, and other edits are made to conveniently reduce the apparent notability of an article prior to the AfD, it's very hard to not get angry. Also if someone puts a lot of effort into checking your sources, removes most of them, but fails to find the various science papers that cited your stuff. Certainly a coincidence.

Proposal for a Solution
What Wikipedia needs, desperately, is a "minor notability" section. A namespace, a category, whatever. Move the "non noteable" stuff there and be done with it. Sure the discussions will continue, but they will be a lot less heated because much less is at stake.

But I fear the deletionists would oppose such a solution. Even assuming good faith, you can't help but get the feeling that for some reason, quite a few of them get a kick out of getting stuff deleted. It's probably a kind of power-trip. So a compromise, which doesn't give you that, would not be acceptable.

That's my rant, over and out.