User:Father Goose/Why we delete

There are several reasons why we delete articles from Wikipedia. Nearly all of them derive from one of the following policies:


 * Verifiability (and No original research, its corollary)
 * Neutral point of view
 * Copyright violations
 * What Wikipedia is not

We are compelled to delete articles built upon information that can never be independently verified. We are also compelled to delete articles that address subjects in an inherently biased way -- although in many cases, an article's focus can be changed to restore its neutrality.

We are also compelled to comply with the laws of the United States, where the Wikimedia Foundation (and its servers) are based. The laws that most frequently bear upon on our work are copyright laws -- all copyright violations found on Wikipedia must be deleted. If this results in all content in an article being deleted, the article itself should be deleted. Not all uses of copyrighted material constitutes a copyright violation, however: see Non-free content.

Working notes:

WP:NOT:

dicdef/lists of dicdefs quotes news feed lists of links

how-tos		v opinion/advocacy	v, npov personal essays	v advertising		npov

While many of the entries in WP:NOT derive from the principles underlying WP:V, WP:NPOV, and WP:NOR, several entries are simply conventions adopted by Wikipedia editors -- some widely accepted, some less so. These center around the assertion that "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia", without acknowledging that it is in fact something far broader than a traditional encyclopedia.

WP:DEL

The only content that can be characterized as truly harmful to Wikipedia is that which violates real-world laws and that which is factually wrong (WP:V) or unproveable (WP:OR). Non-neutral content (WP:NPOV) can be factual but present a distorted picture that is ultimately factually wrong as well.

All other content is unlikely to harm Wikipedia, although its inclusion would broaden Wikipedia's mission from "being an encyclopedia", in a traditional, narrow sense, to "being a repository of knowledge", encompassing an encyclopedia but many other forms of knowledge as well. Wikipedia already is something broader than an encyclopedia -- or maybe it is more truly an encyclopedia (enkýklios paideía; "general education") than all its predecessors. Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikinews, Commons, and the other Wikimedia projects can be thought of collectively as exactly that repository of knowledge, with different types of information partitioned into different databases. A greater degree of integration between them all would be highly desirable.