Wikipedia already stuffers from variable quality, and all its content comes with a big huge caveat emptor. Furthermore, the existence of poor quality doesn't have any bearing on whether the well trafficked content is good or not.
Deletionists really don't have any leg to stand on, and i find it mystifying and infuriating that they are allowed to continue deleting content put up by other people (mostly in good faith), essentially without cause or justification.
They can't delete their way to good content, because no content on wikipedia starts out as good content. You can't claim that leaving up poor content is a problem, or they should just lock the whole fucking thing, and only accept well curated patches.
To put it another way, even if someone writes a really, really good article about their neighbor's dog Spike - complete with genealogy down to Rover the fifth, the harrowing near-death encounter when that gallstone removal surgery went wrong, and even a detailed account of that incident last Wednesday when Spike wet the carpet, there are so few people who know anything about that dog that it's impossible to fact-check the article. For all anyone knows it's all made up. So the line has to be drawn somewhere, and there need to be clear policies for it, as otherwise, well, things like this happen.
These programming languages aren't non-existant, and can be verified as actually existing. It's not that there are no references to it.
On top of that, i'm still unclear why it would even matter? Things with little interest will generate little traffic. The potential to misinform is pretty low. And if it were to be the case that an article that was incorrect (maliciously or not) were to suddenly see an increase in traffic, presumably that can only serve to encourage people to point out inaccuracies and correct them (treating fictionalized accounts of anything as being an inaccuracy). And wikipedia already has a mechanism for resolving synonymy and name-resolution disputes.
Also, I think it would be easier to get editors if being an editor were more about making the site good and less about dealing with the head cases who currently edit the site. (Nothing personal intended against any individual editors who may be reading — it's just a general reflection of how things look to people who have casually attempted to try editing.)
It sounds like a missing UI. Something like the ability to show recent changes sorted by the pages' popularity. Too simple?
Another way to put this is, you can't expect a single flat namespace to contain even a reasonable amount of human knowledge. At some point, as any Librarian will tell you, you have to make a 2nd level. If they did then they'd solve the problem since you could say nothing is deleted and is just "subbed".
Of course, then that'd be a new insult, but at least information wouldn't disappear for no reason other than egocentric opinion.
You understand that you just said the organization that's devoted to becoming the largest record of human knowledge is interested in keeping that large record as small as possible.
Holy crap, I officially give up. The internet is nothing but a giant never ending scene from Catch-22.
If you want an article about every Pokémon and not just Pikachu you should start your own Pokémon wiki. That’s Wikipedia’s official party line. Well, at least the party line of the Deletionists (who seem to be winning).
This is a very controversial topic, the battle between Deletionists [1] and Inclusionists [2] has been raging for a long time on Wikipedia. Technical reasons really play no role in this battle.
[1] Wikimedia 2010-11 budget plan (PDF): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1...
This is exactly why I, like Zed, am sitting here wondering why precisely you think _I_ should donate so "deletionists" can have their own private party with their own stupidly applied overgeneralised rules? Maybe someone should start a wiki listing these other non-wikipedia-wikis, so I could go to some of them to donate instead.
Wikimedia will actually be spending those $16 million they just raised, those are not available to pay for anything besides what has already been budgeted. They would have to raise $32 million to pay for those ten minutes.
If you still believe that paying people to maintain Wikipedia is a viable strategy, consider the wider implications. Why would anyone volunteer to work for Wikipedia if Wikimedia is willing to pay at least some people for the exact same work?
I’m willing to bet that on average an article gets more attention per year than ten minutes. Wikipedia couldn’t survive if all that volunteer work would disappear.
...and funnily enough the root of the problem, if Wikipedia could have a rating scale instead of the binary "accepted/deleted" then everyone could be happy. In such a system you could browse only reviewed, fact-checked, vetted, editted, adminned, wp:blergh articles, and have something that looks a lot like a real encyclopedia. Or you could browse at the EVERTHING setting, and read more about obscure pokemon references than you could ever want, or you could browse at any setting inbetween and get the level you want.
It's a false dichotomy that the choice is between either a well-edited encyclopedia or un-edited fandom crap. You can have both at the same time.
I’m not trying to defend the notability rules (I think that they are quite often pretty stupid), I’m only saying that it is completely and utterly wrong to claim that Wikipedia’s notability rules exist for a technical reason.