It's true that an additional article on Wikipedia has zero marginal cost in terms of compute, bandwidth, and storage.
But every article on Wikipedia imposes maintenance costs on the project, because every article is an opportunity for error, and it's the responsibility of every member of the project to eliminate those errors.
You don't have to spend much time on Wikipedia to get a visceral sense of the validity of this argument, whether or not you agree with it. It is kind of a miracle --- not a small one --- that Wikipedia exists at all. It is one of the great achievements of the Internet writ large. And it exists in spite of:
* Enormous numbers of articles written as advertisements designed to piggyback off Google's preference for Wikipedia articles on its first SERPs
* Enormous amounts of casually malicious spam and vandalism, some of which is purposely designed to avoid detection as long as possible
* Enormous amounts of agenda-driven bias working continuously to turn Wikipedia articles into advocacy pieces for one side or another of a given controversy
The point of the notability standard isn't to reward people for fame, or to save hard disk space. It's to put some reasonable boundary on the subjects for which unpaid editors should be expected to mount the often-tedious defense against these forces.
> But every article on Wikipedia imposes maintenance costs on the project, because every article is an opportunity for error, and it's the responsibility of every member of the project to eliminate those errors
Indeed. The best way to answer that is to recruit more members, not to reduce the size of the project.
This article struck a chord with me as a lot of the issues are growing pains that we've been going through with OpenStreetMap. OSM is expressly not deletionist. We do have maintenance concerns - particularly in the case where "out-of-towners" come in and blitz a town, adding all the shops then leaving before a community has formed to maintain them. But our chief response to that is to try to grow our community.
OpenStreetMap is an impressive project, but Wikipedia is in some sense the most impressive, most ambitious project in the history of the Internet (and, because of how important the Internet is in the history of recorded human knowledge... well, &c &c &c).
The active Wikipedia editing community has been remarkably stable for years (the predictions in Gwern's 2009 post do not appear to have borne out). It's a large and vibrant community. OSM is still a growth community (to wit: it is not the most important mapping project in the world, while Wikipedia is almost definitely the most important encyclopedia), and has a narrower charter. Community growth targets that might be a reasonable lift for OSM might not be for WP.
There are a lot of things Wikipedia could potentially do to grow the community. But curbing deletionism isn't likely to be one of the more important ones. Deletionism is primarily an Internet message board concern.
So my counterargument would be: Wikipedia should first do big things to improve participation (for instance: it can and should be made much easier, in a technical/UX sense, to write or edit an article). Then, once the community has grown, it can start turning the dials on how much vandalism and error its community can sustainable fight.
I think the page you linked to is a pretty wonderful capsule summary of how Wikipedia's community differs from other communities. I hadn't read it before and am glad I did. Thanks!
Except as you and I have argued about in the past, "notability" is redundant. Wikipedia already requires verifiable information from reliable sources. That should be the only bar.
"Notability" introduces a way to subjectively say "well, yes, this is verifiable information from reliable sources, but I don't like this subject, so it shouldn't be allowed anyway". No amount of hand-waving can change the fact that this is what the criterion is used to do, and it makes Wikipedia a laughingstock when coupled with its protestations of neutrality.
The same reason libraries deaccession books even when they have spare shelf space, and, unless you are a hoarder, you get rid of/donate/sell unused items from your dwelling.
Sifting through hoarded garbage has a huge cost - your time. You should not have to waste time even bothering to skip through garbage articles in an encyclopedia. Wikipedia editors should not have to waste their time reviewing updates to garbage articles, making sure the articles are categorized properly, etc.
I don't think you realize the amount of new stuff that pop up in the world every day. That would be a tremendous amount of articles if we wrote about every single little thing.
