User:Jet57/Deletionism

(Warning, rough rambling ahead!)

Inclusionist tendencies
I don't have a problem with lists. They are just another index into the content. Any large project requires infrastructure in order to scale. If useful information is being drowned out in a list, why not create List of Major Widgets as well as List of Widgets? I guess it's an invitation to a flamewar as to what counts as major, but at least there will be a place for the debate rather than having minor items anonymously deleted without explanation.

Bad lists are usually bad because they are examples of poor information design, rather than because their content is inherently bad. List of TV shows beginning with a K is not unencyclopedic; it's just poor organisation.

Stubs and even substubs are cool. If one person adds an article a sentence long, it's an invitation for someone else to add their single sentence. We have 50000+ contributors. Substubs will grow long enough eventually.

What limit is Wikipedia converging to anyway? Everyone seems keen to reach 1,000,000 articles, and who won't want to shoot for 10,000,000 when we've done that? Are there even 10,000,000 things in the world worth writing about? When we have an article on every highly notable person, place, thing and phenomenon in the universe, do we just stop and concentrate on improving the grammar? It seems to me that the ultimate limit of Wikipedia is a very, very general repository of, and index to, knowledge.

I personally have zero interest in all the Rambot generated articles about Nowheresville, Kentucky, USA, but they don't harm anyone, and part of what makes Wikipedia so vast and diverse and useful is that people are free to write about what they know rather than be told "sorry, you don't know anything notable." I'm sure there is my mirror image out there somewhere whose ancestors founded Nowheresville and is just dying to write up its history. I'm equally sure that person doesn't care about Hutchinson operators and the named craters of Mars. Wikipedia is stronger and deeper for having us both, instead of kicking us out.

I dislike the word 'encyclopedic' as used to define what should be in Wikipedia. 15 years ago, sound and video was unencyclopedic, yet even Britannica now includes clips. I think Wikipedia will help further shift the primary meaning of 'encyclopedic' to "all encompassing", its current secondary meaning. Nevertheless we currently need some standards of notability to stave off a potential crapflood. Maybe in the future we won't.

Deletionist tendencies
And yet there must be *some* notion of notability, as there is literally an infinite amount of "knowledge" that is Verifiable. Plate tectonic origin of clay found in bricks used to build retaining wall of 67, Smith Road, Tower Hamlets, London, indexed by brick? So what definition of notability would exclude trash like this but allow List of people with a personalised pavement slab on that road in Hollywood? (This last example being extremely tenuously encyclopedic, but hopefully not so out of the question that we'd delete it without thought). Could there ever be a definition which everyone agreed on? What is notability anyway? I think the question is a bit like the question of artificial intelligence: "I'll know it when I see it."

The great deletionist nightmare is the Library of Babel scenario where every piece of information is present, but is drowned out by everything else. I don't believe inclusionism need lead to this scenario. In fact it's things like "Lists of X..." and "Categories of X..." and "Timelines of..." and "Index of..." that provide the infrastructure which will save us from the nightmare.

So my opinion is:

Zero tolerance for: spam, vandalism, commercialism, POV-pushing ("List of Morons Who Voted UKIP in 2005"), patent nonsense, and non-notable vanity.

Almost zero tolerance for: foreign text. Best just to delete and point the user to the relevant language encyclopedia rather than trying to translate it.

Distaste for:


 * Huge unwikified lumps. Usually a result of wholesale copying, possibly copyright infringement, getting the project into more trouble than it needs.

Urge to merge:


 * News articles that should be on wikinews. Some things seem significant while they are happening, but turn out to be either media hype, or just another link in a long chain of events. "May 15th Bombings in Iraq" is not an article, it's a fact for the article about the Iraq war or whatever.
 * Fancrumbs. I have no objection to articles for every baddie in Star Wars, but if there's only a paragraph to say about them, merge them into an umbrella article.
 * Articles that seem unable to tell the different between fantasy and reality; these are the articles which state with a straight face things like "Griblet was leader of the Frunty Tribe of Yollups VI before the Second Sargrinchrynthblough Wars".

Tolerance for:


 * Foocruft. People complain about fancruft being of interest to only a small group of people. What about all the Mathcruft we have here? Fancruft can fall into any of the above low-tolerance categories, but providing it doesn't, I don't see the harm.

Abstract opposition to:

This includes crankism. There are a bunch of people with large, extensive websites and even real world organisations (*cough*, Sci*ntol*gy) dedicated to a purely faith-based or fiction-based interpretation of the universe. They do not acknowledge things like Logical Fallacies. They have no interest in debate. They do not belong here. Wikipedia must, by definition, be secular. An encyclopedia which respects one faith above another is not an encyclopedia.
 * Extreme alternate philosophies. The basic idea of an encyclopedia is a rationalist one. I don't think it's possible to run a project like this unless you fairly deeply believe in rationalism. I don't mean to exclude non-secular writers or anyone who behaves irrationally; after all, who never something irrational? But unless you, in principle, believe in logic and argument as the arbiter of truth, you won't get far writing an encyclopedia.