Deletionists of Wikipedia are just destinied to fall on their face, and embarrass the whole project.
Deletionism is the single big thing that makes Wikipedia somewhat sour in my view.
https://www.meta-chart.com/share/how-wikipedia-deletionism-w...
Two important takeaways are: A lot of stuff on Wikipedia just isn't encyclopedic. For example, there's a lot of sports trivia about obscure teams and local leagues. Such data deserves structured storage and not Wikipedia, and I just don't feel "2013 Richmond Raiders season" is more important than any single matematician who worked with Erdős.
Second takeaway, a whole world of topics is just not ever noted by Wikipedia. For examples, you can have whole branches of local music scenes ineligible for note because every single artist fails to "be mentioned in a paper made of paper" (in 2010s, seriously) or "sell 3k discs made of plastic and foil" (again, this is in 2010s).
If there's some kind of consistent policy I definitely don't see the value of it.
If it's in the New York Times you can probably believe that it's not been created to game Wikipedia, the same cant be said for a random blog.
I regularly see people complain about this without mentioning how they would solve this problem.
I'm not sure what the best answer is either. The closest I've seen is to overlay a more inclusionist Wikipedia with some sort of crowdsourced reputation/quality moderation system. That can be gamed too of course but something along those lines may be the best approach.
I can understand "we could not verify this so we are deleting this article", but not "we speedy deleted this article without checking anything". The latter has no excuses except for obvious commercial spam.
What can go visibly wrong if Wikipedia would cover different subset of obscure topics than it does currently?
We're not talking about faking facts in well-visited articles, since a) that's not what is being discussed, and b) that has been done anyway, getting into news multiple times.
Does deletionism sometimes leads to embarrassing results? As witnessed, it does.
Would less deletionism lead to Wikipedia becoming "not really usable across a wide range of domains"? I can't see how it would, neither could you.
So I would argue that Wikipedia deletion policy is considerably suboptimal.
I guess deletion also serves to keep editors in check, if they don't meet quality standards. It's simply more difficult to delete a deletion-privileged user who has also a number of contributions under the belt. This is similar to police corruption, or shirky's principle.
Also no reason for valid articles to be deleted from Wikipedia.
I am against corruption and this is awful. Nobody should be reasoning this.
It's unlikely most people would do these things just for fun, but allowing citations that can be verified using ordinary research methods seems pretty reasonable.
"We could not verify this fact" is not a valid reason for deletion, let alone speedy deletion. The requirement is verifiability (it must be possible to verify this fact using reliable sources), not verification (it's OK if the sources are not immediately available).
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_...)
They don't just speedy delete articles about music groups, they have a dedicated template for it. As per CSD A7.
I don't see why a page about music group would be "obviously inappropriate". Maybe you will care to explain?
I know, because I've done both.
How about "2013 Richmond Raiders season"? Apparently this is more encyclopedic? There are no specialized sites for this?
I would say you did not carry your point across.
> How about "2013 Richmond Raiders season"? Apparently this is more encyclopedic? There are no specialized sites for this?
No I'm not, I just choose to ignore sportsfandom.
You choose to ignore sportsfandom, but apparently it gets out of jail free card on Wikipedia. Is it a good thing? Why? Where's the motivation? Who decided that?
no it does not. These artist articles are created in subpar condition and left to rot, most of the creators not coming back, in the extreme case but often enough. There's certainly a bunch of obscure artists, say death metal bands ... and on the other hand my local low league team doesn't have a page. The proportions you are comparing are quite different.
> Where's the motivation? Who decided that?
there's a thing or two to say about comercialization, I'll give you that.
And, as you suggest, the fact that the high school quarterback or a local diner got written up in some local newspaper that has managed not to go out of business yet doesn't make them more notable in any important sense than, say, pretty much any scientist with a tenured position at a major university. (Or someone who is well known in open source circles or a senior executive in a major company or ...)
I'm not sure what the best answer is. We pretty much know that anything goes doesn't really work (see Google Knol). But the current system on Wikipedia is pretty flawed as well.
Plenty that really doesn't seem to pass the sniff test manages to stick around. Though I'd prefer too many edge cases than too few. There's already a mechanism to mark pages with a caveat for needing cleanup or expansion after all.
There are certainly plenty of cases that would seem to be at one extreme or the other. National political figures, professional sports teams, etc. etc. are clearly notable. The random person whose name is only visible on the Internet on their own website probably not.
But in between those poles are published but not well-known books, minor league baseball players, little-seen low-budget movies, random board games, amateur bands etc.
Whether, for example, every book that has ever been published could potentially have its own Wikipedia article is ultimately an opinion/philosophy about whether there should be some limits on content that's just very obscure on Wikipedia even if it's theoretically verifiable to at least some degree.