I last spent significant time on WP in 2007, and "deletionism" was very much the mainstream principle of the site back then.
Wikipedia has extensive coverage of Pokemon; it covers Pokemon better than it covers abstract algebra! What it doesn't do is cover every single aspect of Pokemon in its own article.
The reason it does that is because there's a tradeoff in managing an encyclopedia between reliability and expansiveness, and Wikipedia has tacked towards reliability. 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.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tqbf
Skip down to "Articles I have tried to delete".
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.
> 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?
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.
Cynically, because if all of this popular high-traffic content were on Wikipedia instead of Wikia, it wouldn't deliver ad views.
Jimmy Wales runs both, and the editorial policy just happened to shake out such that his non-profit pushed a ton of high-traffic content onto his for-profit service. Go figure.
Getting good search results is definitely a problem that a ton of people have spent time working on. But I don't really think that it is that important of a problem in some cases. Sure, it might be nice if wikipedia could accurately distinguish whether I wanted info on wood ash or Ash the fictional character, but that creates problems. It basically makes implicit assumptions about what I am interested in. And sometimes it can be nice to have less intelligent results.
That is why wikipedia has a piece of text saying something along the lines of "This page only covers Foo, for any other usage of Foo see: Foo (Disambiguation)".
> For instance, if I'm searching for ash on wikipedia I probably want wood or volcanic ash. But if I'm searching for ash on a pokemon wikipedia I want info on the main character.
One of the things that is nice about using Duckduckgo in conjunction, is that you can use the `!w` bang, and do something like `!w Ash (Name)` and Wikipedia's naming is usually predicable enough to get to the right article first time.
Why couldn't the Pokemon Wikipedia articles be as extensive as the Bulbapedia ones? There is demonstrable demand and interest in maintaining such extensive information as evidenced by the commitment of the contributors to Bulbapedia to keep it so up to date and pristine.
If an article rots where nobody wants to maintain it or cannot write it with sufficient information to justify it's existence that is a very different situation to this. But that is not an arbitrary line of relevance someone pushes upon everyone else. You could just have a minimum length and minimum sources and be done with it.