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Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure the Wikipedia mods have many great, valid reasons for deleting articles. Unfortunately for the ignorant masses, this has bad optics, since it looks like it runs counter to their goal of "cataloging all human knowledge".

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But the goal isn't to catalogue all human knowledge. Having an article for every living person would be "cataloguing all human knowledge" but it would also be a meaningless endeavour. Some knowledge is worth preserving in an encyclopedia, other knowledge isn't. That is why they have their notability guidelines.

I've found myself running into this sort of trap a lot. When I do something I think about the data that will be created and how to preserve it, and sometimes this prevents me from ever doing the thing, while the reality is that any data generated is worthless anyway.

For example: if I move my email off Gmail, how to archive my YouTube notification emails? I worry about that and I just can't get myself to realize it's a non-problem and I can just delete them. There could be some historical value in an archive of YouTube notification emails over 20 years but (unfortunately for future historians studying YouTube) the weight of carrying those around us not worth the low expected value. Even though the reason I put them in their own folder was to declutter my inbox, not to archive them!

That is obviously no longer the goal. It hasn’t been for years now. However, its original goal was to provide “every person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge“.

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