Wikipedia talk:Improve the junk

Mike, you asked for my comment. I agree with what you are saying, but I do have to point out that there is a lot of unimprovable junk, with both old and new articles. I've deleted about 12,000 articles now, and I think by the most generous standard less than 5% would have had any potential whatsoever. Why did I delete them when they might have had potential? Because in practice it was extremely unlikely they'd be improved, and they were so inappropriate that their presence was harmful. I can fix maybe 2 or 3 articles a day, and only 1 if it means rewriting from scratch.
 * A fair enough statement, yes. I have that same difficulty. Schmidt,  MICHAEL Q.

But, exactly as you say, the way to improve the situation is for more people to participate. I see some other admins who delete articles making any effort to improve some of them. I see some admins who decline to delete doing a little more than just removing the deletion tag. But most of the admins who do deletions, do not actually seem to look to try to rescue at least some of them. We have 700 active admins--if each of them rewrote 1  article a day, we would really get somewhere.
 * If one had to add before one could detract....  Schmidt,  MICHAEL Q.

And there are some cases where it is better not to use the alternatives. With a new article, especially in the case of something that is outrageously spammy, and written by someone with obvious COI, deletion is sometimes the best way to get the author to do it over better and learn. It gets much more attention than do warnings.
 * And yes here too... but such often fall under WP:NOT and earn deletion due to that viloation.  Schmidt,  MICHAEL Q.

Perhaps you might want to add some of this.  DGG ( talk ) 19:20, 13 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I'll see what I can do, as options are always available.  Schmidt,  MICHAEL Q. 09:56, 17 November 2010 (UTC)