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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The exact opposite thing is true. If the article is bad, it needs to not be on the site. What's important are reliable articles, not how many articles there are. It's perfectly fine for a topic we know will be more obviously notable in the coming years to stall for an article until a decent one can be written.

This has been the ethos of the project practically since its inception. It's always startling to see people questioning Wikipedia's premises, since it seems pretty clearly to be one of the most successful volunteer projects in the entire history of the Internet.

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Wikipedia can actually be pretty schizophrenic on the issue. Depending on timing and the interest groups involved, it can go either way.

I've personally given up on editing Wikipedia (too many fanatics with infinite time), but IMHO it needs to be much more deletionist than it is now. There is value to its current wide scope, but its maintenance model has trouble with long tail articles. It shouldn't have an article unless it can consistently gather medium-sized quorum of active editors to watch over it.

That is not what Wikipedia's policies say. They say that if a topic full-fills the notability criteria there should be an article for it. It does not say that if an article is bad it should be deleted - rather the contrary - if an article is bad, improve it!

This was the ethos of the project in the beginning but is not the ethos anymore. People have realized how valuable it is for companies and other actors to have their own article on Wikipedia. Therefore Wikipedians have created a very bureaucratic system for deciding which articles should be created. And people like to wield power. For example, by rejecting perfectly good articles.

This article was struck for not meeting the notability criteria, which involves citing reliable sources that make a straightforward claim of notability. It's not a perfectly good article.

If the problem is rejection of "perfectly good articles", why start by arguing there's no grounds for deleting bad articles? Seems like dancing around the point.

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