[flomo]

And I hate that argument too. There are long-term costs for maintaining any page on wikipedia, because there's always people out there looking to insert troll content or provide biased information for a specifically-targeted search term.

I'd estimate the typical page on Wikipedia has 0-1 people actively looking after it. And some of these articles are extremely popular (but noncontroversial) people/places/things. Wikipedia is full of articles which are "done" but still suck.

So you cannot look at a volunteer project and determine the storage costs are negligible, no problem, because that's very obviously not the main challenge.

[Sacho]

> There are long-term costs for maintaining any page on wikipedia, because there's always people out there looking to insert troll content or provide biased information for a specifically-targeted search term.

But these costs do not scale on a per-page basis; rather, they scale based on the number of trolls. I don't think the number of pages meaningfully changes the amount of effort "trolls" put into "trolling"; meanwhile, automated tools like watchlists allow you to keep an eye on an unlimited number of pages.

It should be much easier to automate anti-"trolling" tools on fringe pages which get very few edits - e.g. automatically adding newly-created or rarely-edited pages to a watchlist.

Finally, it doesn't look like wikipedia has a great editor retention policy if the problem was really combating trolls; There seems to have been an assumption of bad faith on the count of GP - if he is really a "PR shill", then no skin off their back - if they're paid to do it, they'll keep trying, becoming a "troll". However, if he was to be a legitimate editor, blaming them from starting in their own topic of interest(even if it was self-promotion) doesn't seem like a good way to retain them as a long-term editor.

[flomo]

> they scale based on the number of trolls

Low-level trolling has almost zero cost on wikipedia, you don't even need an account. Especially for articles that are largely politically uncontroversial and "done". So they probably catch most of the vandals, and use their process to stop maybe the top 20% of political kooks. But when some random adds dubious information to a long-tail article, it can hang around for years.

[hueving]

Moderators are voting to remove pages that have validated data. That's idiotic because it's more work than leaving the article be in a locked state.

I would rather have a bunch of articles that are locked rather than deleted by some moderator that thinks they are defending the glory of worthy human knowledge.

[ErrantX]

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