[m0llusk]

There is plenty of room for more content but deletion focused contributors remove whole classes of articles and tend to turn off whole groups of contributors in the process. The biggest challenge for Wikipedia now is to find some way to tame the rise of deletion as a form of contribution.

[crmrc114]

Yep, had plenty of bespoke technical pages that explained some pretty involved network infrastructure from the 90s and various hardware families outside Cisco. The delete party would come in like locust and nuke all your work citing all forms of wikilaw. I just can't be bothered. Internet archive and EFF get my money each month. Not the wiki foundation.

[geofft]

Not to defend Wikipedia at all (and they certainly should not get your money), but, the solution that Wikipedia themselves would advocate is that you should publish those explanations on some site of your own, and Wikipedia could then cite it. That also means that the publications are under your control and yours alone and nobody can come in and delete them.

It's pretty great that Wikipedia is a centralized source of information, but I do sort of lament the decline of personal web sites on GeoCities or university web hosts or whatever.

[ratww]

> the solution that Wikipedia themselves would advocate is that you should publish those explanations on some site of your own, and Wikipedia could then cite it

The problem with "deletionism" is not lack of sources and citations. It's the fact some moderators don't want certain material there. Creating sources is not a guarantee you'll be able to add them back, quite the opposite.

In the past I've seen purges of all kinds of well-sourced material: law, electric engineering, literature, important CS/engineering figures. It's never because of lack of sources, it's always some subjective rule.

Actually, I've seen "the content is already available in another website, why do we need it here?" being be used as an argument against reinstating some very uncontroversial articles.

[zzo38computer]

My opinion is that it should be inclusionism and not deletionism. Include many thing as needing.

> Actually, I've seen "the content is already available in another website, why do we need it here?" being be used as an argument against reinstating some very uncontroversial articles.

Having it on Wikipedia is helpful. This way, you can find it in Wikipedia, can have a free license, mirrors (if there are any), can use MediaWiki API, and will have the wikitext you do not worry as much about the hostile JS/CSS and can also print out. And, you can also fix it if there is a mistake in the article, too.

They should also try to be neutral from corporate or other interests (although if there are multiple points of view about some subject, they can try to be included if you can avoid being biased, but in the total it should be neutral).

[ratww]

> My opinion is that it should be inclusionism and not deletionism. Include many thing as needing.

I agree with you, unfortunately we're losing the battle here.

There are already plenty of rules defining what fits or not in Wikipedia: not only it needs sources, but also notability and it can't be original research.

The issue is not that those rules aren't being followed: is that deletionist mods are deleting articles, metadata, lists, and everything else, even when those rules are followed. And they're also making it harder to create new articles.

[paleotrope]

Do the sources even matter? I don't know how many articles I've read in the past that have had some very questionable "facts" so I check the source link and it's a dead link.

How does that work?

[ratww]

Great point.

In practice dead links should be and are mostly converted to web.archive.org links. It's not a problem for them to be dead, they just have to exist somewhere and the original source should be classified as reputable. It's hard.

[bawolff]

The quality of a product is just as much about what it contains as what you leave out.

Deletionism vs inclusionism is a balance, and i don't know if wikipedia has the right balance, but i'm glad its not everything2. If "everything goes" content-wise, then you lose consistency and quality, which is a big part of what makes wikipedia great.