User:Cyclopia/Inclusionism

I am an inclusionist. It seems that many editors refrain to call themselves deletionists or inclusionists, but truth is that the tendencies exist and make sense. I am not ashamed of explicitly stating this.

Being an inclusionist does not mean I want to keep everything. There are a lot of things that we must delete: hoaxes, patent nonsense, stuff made up in a day, and basically anything unverifiable, for example. Many small topics can also be covered better in a larger article: in this sense I am quite the mergist as well. I am also an eventualist: Wikipedia is an eternal work in progress, and we should not be ashamed of this obvious fact. Rather, we should embrace it.

However once content is verifiable by one or more reliable sources, we should feel compelled to include it somewhere, unless there are very serious reasons not to do so (WP:BLP is one of these exceptions). There are a few reasons for that:

1. Providing knowledge is our job. - This is the root of all. Everytime a reader expects to find information on WP and doesn't, Wikipedia has failed. Sometimes these failures are unavoidable: lack of verifiable info and BLP concerns can require this. However we should strive to keep such failures to a minimum, and especially to avoid intentionally creating holes.

2. Different people have different definitions of encyclopedic knowledge. - What seems pointless to me can be extremly important or useful to someone else. When we say that "this topic does not belong to an encyclopedia", even if verifiable and covered by sources, we are claiming to decide in place of our readers what they should read and what not. Problem is, what is cruft to me is essential to you, and viceversa. The only reason to avoid systemic bias and discrimination is keeping most of this information, once it passes minimal criteria.

3. We are not Google/We are not the Internet Funnily enough, this is often used as an argument for deletion. It is instead an argument for inclusion. Search engines and Wikipedia have two very different goals. A search engine tells you where to find raw information, without discriminating between sources etc. Wikipedia's goal is to take this information, condensing it, complementing it with offline sources, structuring it, presenting it in an unbiased and consistent fashion. Two very different things, and a good reason why "if readers want to know X, they can go on Google" is not an argument. They can always do so.

Why deletionism is a PR disaster
Notice that arguments based on "looking good" are very weak (even if bella figura is inherently Italian). But these quotes give insight on how deletionism looks to the external world, for whose people who think that "deleting first, ask questions later" is a way to improve our image.

Essays on inclusion

 * User:Mike_Cline/The_Inclusionist's_Guide_To_Deletion_Debates
 * An inclusionist Slate editorial
 * Seth Finkelstein on incl/del
 * Guardian on new phase of WP
 * Who writes Wikipedia?
 * The Charms of Wikipedia
 * Like Boiling a Frog