Gwern Branwen wrote: > > It is easier to attack than defend. If you want to justify high > standards and removal, there are easy arguments: 'what if this could > be another Seigenthaler?' 'what if this is fancruft Wikipedia will be > criticized for including?' > > If you want to defend, you have... what? Even the mockery of _The New > Yorker_ didn't convince several editors that [[Neil Gaiman]] should > cover Scientology. There is no beacon example of deletionism's > grievous errors. > > Deletions can be wrong, negative, thoughtless, whatever you want to call them. The whole inclusionism-deletionism row boils down, though, to the idea that _sometimes_ there is a tension between quality and quantity. Book authors know this. Non-paper hypertext authors probably have to learn it. You can attribute bad editing to bad faith, or to a bad wikiphilosophy, all you like. The discussion becomes sensible round about the point where the abstract ideas start to relate to the concrete realities of our "production process". The more we understand that, the more intelligent a discussion we can have about it.
The process does exhibit an asymmetry. The many, many thousands of cases where articles are wrongly deleted and then restored, or big cuts made and then reverted, are less damaging to Wikipedia's reputation than the specular examples where something was included wrongly? You bet. Ask [[Taner Akçam]]. Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l