you might enjoy Deletionpedia: http://www.deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_...
I can see why most were deleted, I chose to view a few pages at random and they were:
- a really non-notable musician (probably self-promotion)
- a hoax ("The Independent City-State of Sonora")
- a game guide to Super Smash Brawl, this is probably something that should have gone on a blog / GameFAQs
- a witty bio about a non-notable person (probably self-bio, or a friend's)
I believe the four of them were deservedly well deleted. Two of the cases, the musician and the game guide, should be hosted elsewhere (personal blog or website).
Under a critereon of "notability" that works great for dead trees but is largely irrelevant to an online primarily text reference.
It's true the admins take notability pretty seriously, but to be fair, so does Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wikipedia folks freely admit that they're elitist in that regard, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. They set it to that level for the sake of maintaining quality and relevancy (which is a measure of notability) to an acceptable degree.
The foundation's ultimate goal is to make a reliable resource for knowledge after all.
What we need to "balance it out" if you will, is maybe another entity(ies) with a broader scope and maybe a looser threshold for notability, but hopefully with more reliability with expert verification ( Citizendium comes to mind : http://en.citizendium.org , but it's no where near as comprehensive ). Still it's not easy to run something like Wikipedia, so whoever will do it would have to have deep pockets and seriously dedicated.
The complaint about wikipedia is that it fails to live up to its ideals. If you had ever been a wikipedia editor you wouldn't talk the way you do. Even as a domain expert it's intolerable to deal with the wikipedia amateur hour culture. It's far more rewarding to submit your articles to Encyclopedia Britannica.
wikipedia'd!
[1]: http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism#the-ed...
Deletionism is the reason it's worth using to begin with. It prevents it from being flooded by crap and allows it to stay on mission. Not everything has to be all things to all people.
Wikipedia isn't one big giant article, where the existence of marginally noteworthy elements distracts you or diverts your attention. The articles that get deleted by the little notability hitlers are contributions with no cost incurred by anyone, save the trivial storage space.
It's like saying some guys tripod page that you never visit is somehow cluttering your experience of web browsing.
I wish they'd err on the side of leaving stuff alone in the 1% of cases where it's not black and white (like the obsolete BBS software example)
Godwin, and wrong on the merits, as well.
The stuff that gets deleted is the stuff that can't be verified, which means there's no way to fact-check it. It isn't about storage space or clutter: It's about not having stuff in there that can't be verified.
Wikipedia is nothing more than the biggest plagiarist / content farm on the Internet. It isn't scrutinized because it has been grandfathered in.
Wikipedia is the ebaumsworld of information. Completely unreliable. Steals credit, traffic, royalties from the content creators. Policies focused on self preservation rather than serving a public good or respecting creators.
The delicious irony of your hatred is that your point is so poorly argued, you must be a wikipedia editor.
I'm actually a pretty accomplished wikipedia editor with several original article credits. The articles are standing today. I have barnstars and everything. But I actually submit my articles to Encyclopedia Britannica now, because I realized the truth about wikipedia. It's just a really low quality content farm that can't be trusted on anything.
What is the point of getting your knowledge from unreliable losers? All the biggest wikipedia editors are no-life losers with zero respect in any real intellectual community. They are divorced from the community of experts and receive nothing but scorn from them.
What's the point of reading an encyclopedia written by people who you can't rely on? Getting 80% of the content right is not an achievement--every content farm on the internet does the same--from eHow to expertsexchange.
Wikipedia is just an ideology and volunteer driven low quality content farm. Due to Wikipedia's overpowering marketing/SEO, when Wikipedia writes an article on a topic, that Wikipedia article will now have higher visibility than the original information source that it scraped and now cites. The Wikipedia article will steal traffic from the original source.
The internet would be so much better without content farms. And Wikipedia is the worst of the worst.
When I feel like writing an encyclopedia article, I send it now to Encyclopedia Britannica. They've edited my writing and incorporated parts into their high quality encyclopedia.
By the way, that study that said that wikipedia was just as good as Britannica was complete bullshit--as flawed as your informal fallacy that you just shat out right above this comment.