Comment by mindcrime
4 years ago
It is very discouraging.
Exactly. What the Deletionists seem to miss is the extent to which their entire position is based on negativity, and how that negativity poisons the well for everybody. Imagine spending hours, or days, or weeks writing a detailed, well-documented, heavily-interlinked, high-quality page only to have it shot in the head in a Deletionist Driveby. Would you ever edit another Wikipedia page again after an experience like that?
If someone were literally being paid to push an agenda online as a day job, they would want to eliminate all organic desire to produce content leaving only the somewhat more influential paid content.
Just because site X is not paying for user generated content, does not mean no people are being paid to generate content on site X.
Always follow the money.
The pretzel logic people tie themselves into to make the world fit their narratives is simply astonishing.
Okay, so, who by you is paying Wikipedia to peddle which agenda?
What the Inclusionists seem to miss is the fact that an encyclopedia isn't The Hitchhiker's Guide or Angelfire, and that every page on the site incurs ongoing volunteer time to patrol for vandalism and corrections. Also, the idea that maybe it's OK if everyone doesn't edit Wikipedia pages; maybe some people should write secondary sources rather than tertiary ones.
What the Deletionists seem to miss is the fact that, since there's not a space problem, then perhaps Wikipedia doesn't have to limit itself to being an encyclopedia of 'articles'. Long ago, for example, lots of people kept 'Commonplace books'. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts....
Something that isn't an article can still be very useful. EG Wikipedia has little to say about "Edmond Halley Sr." [sic; his name's Edmond Humphrey Halley], a father who proved critical to his son's success, and whose mysterious death complicated his son's life in multiple ways. I spent two hours online learning how and why (w/cites), but there's no room in the WP inn for publishing that summary.
None of them miss that fact. It's the most basic, common argument people throw at their position. People who know virtually nothing about what Wikipedia is --- see: this thread --- have no trouble coming up with that argument off the top of their head.
Once again: space has nothing to do with the argument for Deletionism. It isn't an elaborate form of garbage collection and encyclopedia-compression. If you're going to argue against their position, you have to go read what it is. They're not hiding it; this may be the most elaborately, carefully documented policy on any major site on the Internet, and your argument doesn't engage with it at all.
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Wikipedia is not limited by the number of pages that exist in a volume. A given page existing doesn't generally make it harder to find another entry. The notability criterion is more applicable to an encyclopedia limited by disc or paper space.
Space has nothing to do with the limitation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence
I write every page in the English and French wikipedia. I run in the deletion problem only in the English Wikipedia, the pages in French are still up.
What the Inclusionists seem to miss is the fact that an encyclopedia isn't The Hitchhiker's Guide or Angelfire,
No, we're all quite aware of that.
I claim that you are not, because your points don't cohere with the concept of an encyclopedia.
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