Why is that a problem? Suppose you write a stub and walk away. Some day I want to look up the same subject and maybe write about it. There are two paths:
1) Your stub still exists. I see your references and use that as a starting point to flesh it out.
2) Your stub was deleted. I see none of your work and start over from scratch.
On a practical level, what would the existence of your stub cost? It's a few KB of text and not directly linked from anywhere; it's not like we all find WP articles by loading a master index and starting from the top.
It is and it does.
> We don't need a campaign of shame and a witch hunt for "deletionists".
Given the lack of official action against what are widely perceived as abusive trolls, I think a shaming campaign is inevitable.
Here's a Jeff Atwood piece from 2006, to cite one example. https://blog.codinghorror.com/wikipedia-inclusionists-vs-del...
>2. That editor leaves the project, typically because of harassment or because someone deleted one of their articles.
Well that was a wild extrapolation. Plenty of people add a stub, don't bother to finish it, and never edit again out of basic disinterest. Since Andrea is almost certainly just guessing, I'm going to guess that the stats (if stats were to be gathered) would show little or no correlation between protected status and failing to complete articles.
As for the topic of spurious deletion of stubs, I don't see the value in it, it would be nice to hear the rationale for the policy.
I think that contextualizing stub deletion as an identity ("The Deletionists") is utterly ridiculous and reads as a personal attack rather than a genuine interest in improving the quality of Wikipedia. It is clear that editors are applying the deletion policy in some fashion, so if there is a problem, it is in the policy. Maybe Wikipedia should send email nags to authors of new stubs. Maybe the policy should guard against deleting articles which are too new to survive.
Calling somebody a "deletionist" is hostile and dismissive. What happens when you're applying the policy legitimately and deleting a six year old stub with one sentence and a single unrelated/incorrect citation, and somebody comes by and accuses you of being a "deletionist". Labeling people is a good way to put them on the defense and ruin a conversation.