Deleting Deletionism?

Monday, 16 Jun 2008

While reading Tim Bray’s Deletionist Morons note, it struck me:

Maybe the deletionists should be relegated to arguing not about whether an article should be deleted, but about whether it gets voted out of the Notable club (and any number of other such clubs that they care to come up with). This label could have an actual effect, such as excluding the article from the Random Page and other kinds of show-this-by-default lists. It should just not make articles any less accessible in a serious way – like make them harder to link, or exclude them from search results, or such. After all, if I’m writing or editing an article on an actually notable subject, such as the Ruby programming language, why should I not be able to put in a link to _why for anyone who wants to know more about his role? The only reason I can see for ever actually deleting an article is if it’s spam.

Then the deletionists can have their Notable Wikipedia playground and the rest of the world can use Wikipedia for what it does best, that is, be a repository for any and all trivia and factoids, no matter how obscure, that you might ever want to find out about.