|
|
|
|
|
|
by Udo
5600 days ago
|
|
|
The implication of deletionism as a philosophy is that readers cannot be trusted to make up their own minds about the merits of an article even if it contains positive and negative feedback markers. The whole deletionism fiasco at Wikipedia is ultimately a software and UI failure. Misguided people who in most cases could never write a good article (or even improve an existing one) themselves are running amok because the system is re-enforcing the belief that their only talent, destroying information, is also a valid form of contribution. It is no statistical accident that rampant wiki deletionism is even more intense in ..."strict" countries such as Germany. At the same time it is important to note that a lot of articles have serious shortcomings and are in need of improvement. While deleting them is in my opinion unforgivable as long as they contain useful information, I believe Wikipedia could profit from a more modern approach to article rating and validation. If substandard articles were allowed to continue existing albeit with low ratings and missing validation tags, Wikipedia as a process could focus more on improvement as opposed to gleeful pruning. If they concentrated on more constructive measures and included better ways of gathering user feedback for quality control, they could also provide former deletionist users with a UI option that simply prevents them from ever having to see an article that is below a certain quality threshold. Everybody would win. As it stands today, Wikipedia increasingly fails at its stated mission of being a repository for the world's knowledge. Sadly, I don't believe it is possible to change Wikipedia in any way, ever. Someday, someone will have to come along and fork it. |
|
|
This is the problem. Most of us just assume that Wikipedia's mission is being the repository for all human knowledge. But it's not. The last time rampant deleting happened (and I lost a page related to one of my projects) they clearly made the argument that being an endless repository was not their goal. Their goal is simply to be an encyclopedia. And even I had to admit that the page on my project is useful information but it would never belong in an encyclopedia.
If anyone wants to start a project that contains all human knowledge, on all subjects, without any constraint -- I think that would be a very interesting idea -- but that project is not Wikipedia.