That said, I never really understood the effort to purge Wikipedia of vanity pages and the like.

Well, think about it this way. I go to Wikipedia, create a page about myself and bits are cheap so nobody cares. There's nothing published about me, so none of the information there is reliable, but nobody's going to read it anyway, so nobody cares. Then I click over to Michael Jackson's page, scroll down to the "cultural influence" section and chime in that...

* [[C Dwyer]] is a big fan of and has been heavily influenced in his daily life by Jackson. He was really sad when Jackson died. [http://caseysite.com/blog/i-love-mj]

Bits are cheap right? All the world's information is important. Why should anybody reading about Michael Jackson be deprived of my opinion about him?

Clearly, there's a point where this becomes ridiculous. Notability has to be resolved sooner or later, so why not resolve it from the start? What makes Wikipedia intriguing is that articles can be interlinked to expand on and enhance each other. If an article cannot benefit other articles, much less does more harm than good, why include it?

I'm not a Wikipedia editor nor much of a Wikipedia user and I don't personally care how they conduct their business. If I were in charge of maintaining the integrity of something like Wikipedia, however, let's just say it would focus a whole lot more on quality than quantity than it currently does.

Would I include an article about Randal L. Schwartz in a general purpose encyclopedia? No. Would I include it in an encyclopedia about computer history and computer science? No. An encyclopedia about the history of Perl? Maybe a footnote.

This is a pretty naïve argument.

Take, for example, the recent brouhaha about Sarah Palin and her comments about Paul Revere. Barring a future where the comments have massively effected misconceptions in the common perception of Paul Revere (let's say, on the order of Columbus's voyage and the flat earth myth), there's basically no grounds for arguing that Palin's comments should be mentioned in the Revere article. But they absolutely are deemed appropriate for the Palin article.

Well there are certainly different degrees of ``inclusionism'' but I have read plenty argue that absolutely nothing is too trivial for Wikipedia. I don't care who's wrong or right, but given the standard the Foundation is attempting to set for themselves, it's clear to me why ``deletionism'' rules.

Indeed, and backpropagating this principle through time, with a few other rough assumptions, suggests there are at least 1 million people who were once notable who will never get their own Wikipedia article. There is, however, a userspace article to commemorate these 'Unknown Notables':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mike_Linksvayer/Article_of...

Wikipedia is not suggesting that Schwartz be deleted. One random guy is. FILM AT 11.

Isn't this why encyclopedias exist, and exactly why this entry shouldn't be deleted?

Personally, I'm in the 'keep' camp, I can't understand why people would want to delete this, unless it's a manifestation of the trolling culture that seems to be springing up in a variety of places.

This has been addressed, somewhat, but I'll say a bit more about it.

This is, sorry to say, a wrongheaded approach. Editorial decisions should be made with some prescience, or at least an attempt at it. To suggest that a contrary approach is an acceptable one has a couple of negative effects:

1. There's the obvious problem, which is that it says after a threshold has been reached, it's okay that this stuff will be lost. Not even through neglect or inaction, but as a matter of policy and very deliberate action. This is, in a word, dumb.

2. It encourages people to spend unfortunate levels of effort on ephemera that's just going to disappear. To put it another way, it squanders an already-scarce resource on stuff that doesn't matter in the long run. That's a lot of churn, and there's enough as it is.