You're presenting a false binary: there's no reason why Wikipedia can't both warehouse useful/important information and also be a cabinet for curiosities.

There's no real cost to keeping Wikipedia articles around.

There's low storage overhead, but there's definitely a quality control cost. You have to have editors maintaining these pages which (if they are being deleted, generally) are not notable enough to have significant reputable sources devoted to them. As such, you can accumulate subtle vandalism, pranks and biased editing.

There's also a search, navigation and organization cost associated with these sorts of things. They need to be linked together, organized into categories, and if you include a bunch of non-notable garbage it's much harder for people to find the high-quality articles about notable things out there.

"Deletionists" aren't running around deleting things out of spite or something, there are good reasons for the notability guidelines.

> You have to have editors maintaining these pages which (if they are being deleted, generally) are not notable enough to have significant reputable sources devoted to them.

But Wikipedia editors are completely non-fungible. The guy who wrote the page on some obscure 80's movie isn't going to start maintaining the Civil War page with all that extra time if you delete his movie. He's just going to stop editing. So the 'quality control' reasoning doesn't hold water with me. The navigation point still stands, but that's a technology problem that can be solved.

But that introduces a huge bias toward political and scientific topics and away from anything else.

FF6? Irrelevant video game, how many wars did it win, why should it be there?

Pfizer? Why should we allow companies to have individual pages, it's just free marketing?

At some point, you cut Wikipedia's breadth down to something that could reasonably be handled by a team of a couple dozen editors. And then you might as well just go with a traditional encyclopedia.

> But that introduces a huge bias toward political and scientific topics and away from anything else.

Well, some scientific topics. An earlier Boing Boing article (http://boingboing.net/2017/02/14/watching-wikipedias-extinct...) references the WP page for hemovanadin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemovanadin . Two editors worked together to "speedy delete" it.

Same author with the same bias then as now; she tried for quite some time to use Wikipedia as a platform for cosmetic services advertising and personal vendettas.

edit: til she was banned from Wikipedia for it, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

Conversely, if a cultural touchpoint shared with millions of neighbors isn't worth writing about, what is? Wikipedia isn't a newspaper so most current events probably aren't worthy of long-term documentation. There are more bands and songs than actors and movies. WP doesn't aim to be a summarized mirror of scientific journals. And yet it contains a little bit of each of those because someone thought they were worth writing about.

I'm asking seriously:

1) What's the problem with every movie (or actor or song) having its own page? They're not all linked from the front page, so they don't pollute WP any more than the existence of some rando's blog dilutes the Internet experience of people who don't visit it.

2) If movies (or actors or songs) aren't worthy of documentation, what do you feel is?

Why is Wikipedia worse with pages for every movie ever made, though? Why would it be better without them?

The irony in the end is that most of the deletions aren't actually deleted, just a bit marked to hide it.

> Is that necessary?

No, but why delete?