> To me, it's a small miracle that Wikipedia works as well as it does, and that Wikipedia has more or less replaced "real" encyclopedias. That they'll occasionally jump the gun on deleting articles that don't look legitimate seems like a very, very small price to pay for that.

A price is something you must give up in exchange for something else. I am not convinced that the wikilawyers are the price of Wikipedia any more than a crazy man punching people outside of McDonald's is the price of a hamburger. In reality, you could probably get rid of one and still have the other.

The value of Wikipedia to most people is in the massive amount of work that is put into improving the articles and the breadth of information it contains despite all the deletion — I know not a single normal person who looks at Wikipedia and says, "Thank God I cannot find anything non-notable on here. I was worried about that."

You haven't actually engaged my argument. My argument is that judgement calls about which articles not to host on Wikipedia are one a small number of driving forces that make the project actually work. You've responded to that by equating judgement calls about not hosting articles with a guy punching people outside a McDonalds. You'll be upvoted for that, because it's good, funny writing, but there's nothing intellectually honest about the point you've made.

I'm not sure if we're just talking past each other or what, but I feel that you're ignoring my point rather than vice-versa. Deleting an article on a computer scientist because he was written up on LWN instead of ComputorEdge does not make the article on Intel any better; it doesn't make the article on the American Revolution any better; it does not have any external impact besides pissing off the guy who wrote the article. Deleting articles does nothing but get rid of those articles. I believe that the site would survive just fine if one day the admins decided to reinstate every good-faith article that was ever deleted.

Where's a link to a debate where a computer scientist's points were deleted from WP because "ComputorEdge" (or any trade rag) trumped LWN?

That's a point you didn't make anywhere upthread, so it's disingenuous to say I'm avoiding it the way you avoided my argument, but I'm happy to stay on track. Point me to the pervasive class of mistakes WP is making by trusting some sources and not others?

I'm sympathetic to this argument, because when I was actually volunteering for WP back in 2007, I spent a lot of time beating back vanity pages that were anchored in one line mentions in trade press articles that were merely regurgitating press releases. So I'm with you about the low value of ComputorEdge. But when you say that computer scientists are systematically disadvantaged because of WP:V rules that prioritize ComputorEdge over LWN, you lose me, because I don't see that happening.

My apologies — I communicated that poorly. I had meant that as a facetious way of saying "niggling issues," rather than a specific indictment. My point was primarily that deleting a questionably notable article does not contribute significantly to the value that people get out of Wikipedia. They are largely orthogonal concerns. I don't think Wikipedia would lose one iota of value in the common person's eye if (without loss of generality) an article on a band in Wisconsin were allowed to remain. Wikipedia was not richer during the period Nemerle's article was deleted.

Incidentally, I just looked over Wikipedia's notability rules and they seem to be a bit more reasonable than they were when I used to edit things there, so props to them for making progress on that issue.

No apology necessary. So, I mostly agree with you: the value of deleting a barely-non-notable article is marginal. But as I've shown I think pretty effectively upthread, with the link to the URL pattern for AfD debates, that's not the problem that confronts Wikipedia; instead, editors on WP are dealing with a torrent of extremely non-notable articles, into which valid articles are, due most often to poor editing, occasionally getting caught up.

It has sat unmolested because you wrote a good bio about a computer security professional. It's difficult for a random Wikipedia denzien to quickly reach the conclusion that Ms. Davidson isn't notable enough. She's works for a powerful, well-known company, and is notable enough that she was asked to testify before Congress on a topic.

Wikipedia gets fuzzy when you step outside the basics. Is comprehensive list of "Two and a Half Men" episodes from 2003 notable? Are the results and player profiles of the 1959 NBA draft worthy? A stub article about a village in rural Poland?

In those cases, the answer is "yes", because there is a constituency for NBA fans and TV fans. When you step outside these types of topics, you are stepping off of a cliff, and wikipedians will capriciously and relentlessly enforce whatever rules they deem important.

From experience on HN: articles about specific living people are the hardest to support. The site has a specific policy (WP:BLP) that raises the sourcing standards for articles about living people.

But I didn't have to do anything to keep my article on the site. All I did was (a) write a clear statement of why the topic was notable, and (b) cite sources. That is not a difficult pair of rules to remember.

But if you believe the prevailing sentiment on HN about how WP and "deletionism" works, it should have been extremely difficult for me to keep Mary Ann Davidson on WP. I should have been in multiple AfD debates defending the article. Instead, I wrote it, walked away, and 5 years later there it stands.

More often than not, what's actually happening in specific deletion freakouts is, the article in question cites no sources, and makes no claim about why the subject is notable.

> If you write an article about an algorithm that cites the academic literature, it'll most likely survive.

Most of the time you actually aren't allowed to do that; there seem to be exceptions in a few fields, such as Medicine, but the overall policy of Wikipedia is that you cannot cite primary sources, preferring, very specifically, newspapers. Of course, there are secondary sources in academia (summary papers), but they are fewer and far between, making it difficult to defend some newer topics. The article on "Coppersmith%27s_Attack" against RSA, for example, is seemingly forced to cite a summary paper. (The article on RSA itself has a couple citations to an original paper, but only if it can be backed with a secondary source.)

This is what Wikipedia actually says about citing journal articles:

    Where available, academic and peer-reviewed publications are usually
    the most reliable sources, such as in history, medicine, and
    science. But they are not the only reliable sources in such areas. You
    may also use material from reliable non-academic sources, particularly
    if it appears in respected mainstream publications. Other reliable
    sources include university-level textbooks, books published by
    respected publishing houses, magazines, journals, and mainstream
    newspapers. You may also use electronic media, subject to the same
    criteria. See details in Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources and
    Wikipedia:Search engine test.

Their policy appears to be the opposite of the one you suggested they had.