[WikipediasBad]

I'm particularly interested in #23 since it is clear that Wikipedia is even more dominant now than it was in 2008: More open alternatives to Wikipedia. Deletionists rule Wikipedia. Ironically, they're constrained by print-era thinking. What harm does it do if an online reference has a long tail of articles that are only interesting to a few people, so long as everyone can still find whatever they're looking for? There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica.

[tlb]

The advantage of deletionism is that users can have some confidence that anything they find on Wikipedia has received some attention from editors. Without deletion there'd be an unlimited number of pages, (100-𝜀)% being crap.

If you search and don't find it on Wikipedia, you can look elsewhere. That's a better experience than finding unmaintained crap.

[skgoa]

But with deletionism an unknown (yet significant) number of pages are still crap. One of the sad aspects of wikipedia is that their idea of "maintenance" enshrines crap and their idea of "sources" makes it incredibly difficult for experts in a (sub)field to improve an deficient article. That's orthogonal to the number of pages, though.

[smsm42]

wikia.com sites? There are non-wikipedia wikis for tons of stuff there, mostly entertainment-related, but nobody would also prevent one from making something like that for everything else. Also, Wikidata is much more permissive than Wikipedia I think, but this one is mostly for data, not narrative descriptions.