[thrower123]

The hard-line Wikipedia deletionists should be deleted themselves. The argument is always brought up, like StackOverflow, that they have to be ruthless or it turns into an Eternal September dumping ground of garbage, but the quality is already very uneven and gatekeeping like Cerberus doesn't help further that goal. There's already a toxic Dead Sea effect where the pedantry and politicking has chased out a lot of people that would contribute; who the hell wants to bother putting in some hours writing something up if it is just going to be summarily deleted?

Bandwidth and hard drives are cheap.

Just spitballing, but it'd be nice if Wikipedia worked a little more like Linux distro repositories. Keep the tightly curated articles in a "core", but leave room for "community" or "nonfree" collections if you want to turn them on.

[CharlesColeman]

> Just spitballing, but it'd be nice if Wikipedia worked a little more like Linux distro repositories. Keep the tightly curated articles in a "core", but leave room for "community" or "nonfree" collections if you want to turn them on.

I think that's a fantastic idea, especially if it would lead to a drastic reduction in the number of articles served from the main Wikipedia domain (to a number that can meet some reasonable quality and maintenance standard, maybe 10 times the size of the most comprehensive print encyclopedia, or a 1/6 of Wikipedia's current size) [1].

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/101795/encyclopedia-britanni...: "The 2002 Britannica contained 65,000 articles and 44 million words. Wikipedia currently contains close to four million articles and over two billion words..."

[bjourne]

Most communities seem to go that way. In the beginning, most people spend their time contributing first-order content. Then, as the community grows, it attracts more meta-users who are more interested in moderating the content creators. They create ever more rules and policies requiring content creators to jump through more and more hoops. Eventually the experience becomes so frustrating that people give up.

Wikipedia seem to me to be in that situation. StackOverflow is on its way there. It has exactly the same kind of problem with "deletionists" that Wikipedia has. Perfectly good questions are often closed for very arbitrary reasons.