[lucideer]

Plenty of comments on here suggesting WP relaxing/removing notability requirements: the problem is deeper.

WP could retain the exact notability requirements they currently have, as written, and still vastly improve the situation from the current mess. As it stands:

- mentions of any thing or person without a pre-existing article (by extension meeting notability requirements) are quickly deleted by fans of the frequently referenced "Write the Article First" essay[0]. While this essay is clearly labelled as an opinion piece, not policy, that opinion is staunchly defended by people with more time on their hands than you do.

- Any effort to follow the essay's advice and actually create a new article is quickly curbed: despite the notability requirements policies containing detailed sections on the benefits of "stubs" as prompts to grow useful article content, newly minted articles are summarily deleted if they are not perfect on first draft (and extremely comprehensively referenced).

When I first started contributing to Wikipedia almost 2 decades ago, these articles and similar debates between cohorts of "deletionists", etc. certainly existed, but what looks to have happened over the years is that the most progressive of those cohorts left, probably tired of constantly grappling with the hostilities of those with seemingly nothing better to do than to pour all of their hours into making Wikipedia their staunchly defended castle.

Becoming a new contributor to Wikipedia today involves a barrier to entry only zealots will bother to spend time overcoming.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Write_the_article_...

[Victerius]

> Becoming a new contributor to Wikipedia today involves a barrier to entry only zealots will bother to spend time overcoming.

The current editors and admins will die someday. Who will replace them? If only the worst kind of people bother making the effort to become the next editors and admins, then Wikipedia will decline in quality and eventually die and be replaced by other sources, like fandom.

[bpeebles]

I'd say its hard to start as a new Wikipedia editor if you only goal is to make article X or make huge changes to article Y that is somewhat controversial. On the other hand, if you start in Wikipedia by doing simple edits in non-controversial subjects (which does improve Wikipedia, and thus, the Internet given how many search engines just scrape Wikipedia for search results), start making making some new articles in notable things that are also not controversial, then you can start understanding how to get controversial (but correct) things added and changed. Yes, that takes longer and is more work, but at the same time, similar to open source software, you have to spend time learning how to code and how to make valuable and correct PRs to make major overhauls to heavily used software.

[lucideer]

This comment would've been mostly* the case a number of years ago - and describes a sane, measured approach to editorial control.

It has changed. There are users with scripts running to detect any additions that don't fit their model, no matter how uncontroversial. It's become difficult to contribute even on the most boring of topics.

* I say "mostly" because the funny thing about controversial topics is that it's often the contributors (rather than "deleters") that possess the greater amount of persistence in pushing the content they want added and kept. So very politically loaded subjects will suffer from the opposite problem, resulting in sprawling trees of linked articles on a subject, each a huge bulk of prose wrestled through numerous talk page threads of PoV objections.

It's the normal/mundane stuff that gets summarily deleted and forgotten about forever.

[psyc]

In other words, shithead humans took over, took control, and made sure it works like every other dull shithead archaic human organization in history. And the deletionists can say they aren't because there's no such thing, because WP was never "meant" to be that, it was always "meant" to be this, this way is the only one feasible, and we've always been at war with Eastasia.

Victors rewrite history, and now the article about it too.