They don’t want to keep the amount of articles as small as possible, they want just the right type and amount of articles so that they can maintain them. Wikipedia depends on volunteers and I don’t think Wikimedia can afford to pay people to maintain articles [1].

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...

[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism

[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism

"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 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.

I don’t think you should do anything and hell is going to freeze over before I defend deletionists beyond pointing out the argument they are actually making.

Sorry, I didn't mean "you" personally, but "you, the holders of the wikipedia official party line".

Any time I find two groups of people arguing and waring over a boolean definition of themselves I can usually find a third option. I also know that they'll never adopt the third option because fighting and winning stupid wars like this makes people feel powerful.