> If you're going to have a reliable encyclopedia, where there's a pretty good chance that any sentence in the site is true, then there's a negative externality to forests of related articles: each one of them is an independent entry point to the site from Google, and each will attract its own edits, and all of those edits need to be policed to make sure they aren't lies.
If this were a risk that we were correctly balancing against, you'd expect there would be some notable base rate of unreliable articles causing readers problems. But I never have this sort of problem. I'm never frustrated because I found something unreliable on Wikipedia, because I can always be skeptical of uncited information.
Elsewhere you asked for examples of damage done by the deletionists. So let me flip it around on you. What are example articles right now that you think are putting a large burden on the community that should be cut?
(As an aside, note the asymmetry: When too many hard-to-police articles are kept, there's ample examples to discuss. But when too many niche articles are deleted, I can't point to anything. I just say "huh, I guess my local taco stand doesn't have an article". And I can never know if it's because no one was interested to write one or because it wasn't notable enough to make the cut...or because the person who was interested enough to write it new it wouldn't make the cut.)
I don't have a recent example to give you (though I could readily generate one by dumping a list of the last week's AfD debates), but I can give you a point-in-time example very easily: here's my old Wikipedia user page:
Several of the red-highlighted articles, which are now gone, were articles for which I lost the AfD debate. Incidentally, just getting this small set of articles deleted was a galactic pain in the ass. People really want to have Wikipedia articles about themselves and their companies.
I think you're wrong about the asymmetry, by the way. Just go to the AfD debate logs: you'll get more now-deleted non-notable subjects than you can possibly read in night, or several nights.
I leave you with this thought: it is possible that Wikipedia has more words of coverage for "StankDawg" than it does for the chinese remainder theorem.
So I'm looking at the StankWag article, which was one of the articles you tried to delete, and I'm 100% sure the internet is a better place for it existing. What is the problem? It's well research and meticulously linked (no doubt to defend it against deletionists like yourself). Who is being misled or confused by bad info?
> People really want to have Wikipedia articles about themselves and their companies.
What is so bad about people wanting to have a wikipedia page filled with true facts about themselves?
>I think you're wrong about the asymmetry, by the way. Just go to the AfD debate logs: you'll get more now-deleted non-notable subjects than you can possibly read in night, or several nights.
First, I have no doubt the info is recorded somewhere, but it's not easily accessible. But more importantly, as I hinted, the bigger problem is the articles that were never written because folk know they would be deleted.
> I leave you with this thought: it is possible that Wikipedia has more words of coverage for "StankDawg" than it does for the chinese remainder theorem.
I don't get the connection. People who are prevented from editing StankDawg won't decide to edit the chinese remainder theorem. Likewise, the fact that reality TV is more popular than Shakespeare may be a sad indicator for the world, but the solution isn't to ban reality TV.
Sorry for the psychoanalysis, but I'm listening to your tone and reading your wiki page...and I think it just irks you that these people get recognition. But we don't need wikipedia to tell us who and what is important in the world. It's just a source of information.
If I told you that there was magical AI software that now automatically patrolled articles and got rid of wrong info reliably, would you suddenly change your stance on deletionism?
Because they're not true facts! They're bullshit advertisements, exploiting Wikipedia's cachet and, more importantly, their super high position on Google SERPs. These are people abusing one of the most important resources on the entire Internet for fucking spam.
I see that you work in software security. Your list of sufficient criteria for Wikipedia relevance, alongside obvious ones like "been in the news" and "authored a book", also includes ones like "discovered a critical vulnerability (or blazed a trail of minor ones)" and "run security for a Fortune-500 company or government agency".
These are rather specific to your own field of interest, and probably someone unfamiliar with software security would say they aren't notable. Consider that you're doing the same thing in deleting well-written articles by other people, ignoring what makes them notable/relevant/useful because you're not familiar with the subject.
If this were a risk that we were correctly balancing against, you'd expect there would be some notable base rate of unreliable articles causing readers problems. But I never have this sort of problem. I'm never frustrated because I found something unreliable on Wikipedia, because I can always be skeptical of uncited information.
Elsewhere you asked for examples of damage done by the deletionists. So let me flip it around on you. What are example articles right now that you think are putting a large burden on the community that should be cut?
(As an aside, note the asymmetry: When too many hard-to-police articles are kept, there's ample examples to discuss. But when too many niche articles are deleted, I can't point to anything. I just say "huh, I guess my local taco stand doesn't have an article". And I can never know if it's because no one was interested to write one or because it wasn't notable enough to make the cut...or because the person who was interested enough to write it new it wouldn't make the cut.)