User:Tom Morris/The Zen of Article Deletion

Warning: this is currently crap but will improve when I finish it.

or How to stop worrying and learn to love deletionism

You see it about once a month if you follow the relevant channels on Wikipedia's complex network of backchannels and project discussion space: some aggrieved group who are enraged that something they think is really cool and awesome and important has been deleted. There's outrage, bitterness and complete disbelief at what those heartless deletionists on Wikipedia have done.

Then you go back to Wikipedia and... nobody seems to care.

What explains the difference of attitudes here and how can people outside Wikipedia become productive contributors in the deletion process?

To explore this, we should see a few of the arguments given by the aggrieved fans of topics which have been deleted.

Why do you need to delete anything anyway?

Here's an example from Slashdot:

"I mean I understand that you want to delete things that are false, or that infringe copyright, or are illegal, or things like that. Right, no problem. But why delete things just because they aren't notable? As you said, it isn't as though we are going to run out of bits. Also it isn't as though it clutters things up, since you access information via search and thus skip over shit you don't care about. Thus there's no reason not to include everything, no matter how trivial and "un-notable""

For the non-Wikipedian, this makes sense. I mean, sure, we aren't running out of bits. But let's give an example of some articles which one might want to delete. Here's something I saw on New Pages recently.

"The iPod touch 4th Generation was created by Apple, Inc. It can be purchased in 8GB, 32GB, and 64GB models. The iPod Touch 4th Generation is capable of taking pictures. Many people believe the photos are high quality, but Apple has stated on their website that they take HD 780p video and photos. Now, apps that require a camera will be able to run properly on hardware other than iPhone."

There is already an article on the iPod touch. We don't need another one called "IPod Touch 4th Generation". The truth is every day, hundreds of new and frankly terrible articles get created on Wikipedia. And a huge number of them get deleted. I consider myself pretty inclusionist and I'm okay with this. There are hardcore inclusionists, but for the most part, inclusionists do not think that anything goes. When faced with an article you care about getting deleted, the natural reaction is to become an extreme inclusionist.

Here's something that I saw for speedy deletion today:

"D-Smart is a digital broadcast platform made by Turkish holding Media Group. It brings hole normal satelite receiver and digital broadcast form together, and makes non-billing TV Service, which is useful."

Note the poor spelling: "satelite" rather than "satellite" and all sorts of grammar issues. And it just isn't interesting. There's no source. What's a "digital broadcast platform"? Who knows? If the article improves a lot, it should probably be kept, but most likely it is written by a drive-by contributor who probably won't improve it.

In addition to lots of frankly terrible articles, there are articles which are nothing but schoolchildren inaccurately describing each other's sexual preferences, hoaxes, adverts, PR pieces, stuff which reads like essays. Spend a few days new page patrolling and you'll find articles with gross copyright violations, very shoddy machine translations of texts in other languages.

Extreme forms of inclusionism are untenable. The reason Wikipedia contributors roll their eyes is they see people who don't contribute say "oh, we should just keep everything". But they don't see how much crap does get deleted. And if they only knew, they would soften their position.