Value, respect, and strive for diversity in editors

I believe the major issue is the conflict between inclusionists and deletionists. Deletionism on Wikipedia is rampant, malign and completely indefensible. It has demotivated many well-intentioned and capable people from contributing new articles, and anything beyond minor edits. Until the struggle between inclusionists and deletionists is resolved decisively in favour of the inclusionists, Wikipedia will have great trouble attracting and keeping new editors.

Rubywine13:49, 7 May 2010

This begs a very interesting idea. Should Inclusionism (or something that conveys the concept) be an explicit part of our goal set? I for one am a rampant inclusionist and wholeheartedly agree with Rubywine’s thought above. Deletion mechanisms are indeed necessary for a variety of reasons, but Deletion should never be seen as a desirable outcome. When deletion is required, it simply means that some other aspect of the system has failed. The system must overwhelming encourage inclusionist behavior that leads to broader quality content coverage and broader and diverse participation while at the same time implementing mechanisms that severely mitigate or reduce the need for deletion. In other words, if we could find a way to convey the idea that deletions are ultimately a bad outcome, regardless of how necessary they are, then we could make great strides toward our broader goals in content and participation. So the question is: Should the Inclusionism concept be incorporated into some part of our goal set?--Mike Cline 15:29, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Mike Cline15:29, 7 May 2010

Taking a side in that conflict will do more harm than good. Sometimes we try to give a shield to one side, and then they learn to use that shield as a weapon. Both sides have legitimate goals, but those goals are often contaminated by wikilawyers, cabals, and the like. Both sides.

What we really need is some kind of dispute resolution process where it's possible that reasonable inclusionists and deletionists can build consensus, away from the disruptive "my way or the highway" inclusionists and deletionists who would rather fight than build consensus.

Randomran15:36, 7 May 2010

I fundamentally agree with your motivation on this. Such conflicts must be avoided and if they can’t be avoided, conflict resolution mechanisms should be efficient and effective. Where I disagree (I think) is with the premise itself that there are (or should be) sides in this. Your statement: Both sides have legitimate goals… is problematic. I do not see Inclusion or Deletion as Sides that have legitimate but conflicting goals. Both are philosophical bents aimed at improving the project—improving content scope and quality. Inclusionists improve scope of content and quality with a more liberal approach to rules. Deletionists improve quality with a more conservative approach to the rules. Both philosophies impact participation (good and bad) in a variety of ways, especially with new participants. The words inclusion and deletion are probably so poisoned as concepts in the project that we shouldn’t be using them. That said, I stand by my comment above that Deletion should never be seen as a desirable outcome. When deletion is required, it simply means that some other aspect of the system has failed.--Mike Cline 18:32, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Mike Cline18:32, 7 May 2010

Thanks for your positive, constructive comments, Mike. I agree wholeheartedly in return with most of what you've said. Inclusionism and deletionism are indeed philosophical bents, with the common goal of improving content scope and quality, but opposing approaches to achieving those goals. And that's why I believe the conflict needs to be resolved decisively in favour of inclusionism; I see deletionism as an aggressive and authoritarian approach to content control that has no legitimate place in the civilised management of a global resource. Owing to the fact that it has driven away so many contributors, Wikipedia is facing a crisis in sustainability. The only thing you say with which I cannot agree is this: "The words inclusion and deletion are probably so poisoned as concepts in the project that we shouldn’t be using them." The philosophical conflict is a real one, and these words describe it well. Using different words won't change anything. I believe the conflict needs to be faced squarely, and if it isn't resolved, then nothing will change.

Rubywine20:36, 7 May 2010

Funny that there is always someone to raise the inclusionist / deletionist debate even here.

To rebound from another discussion, i think there are to much effort wasted from both sides to pass for the "Good guys". The "we are the heroes and they are the villains" propaganda is tiring moderate editors.

KrebMarkt21:25, 7 May 2010

I have to agree with KrebMarkt. I've seen great "inclusionists" and "deletionists" become administrators, and I've seen some of them come together to find compromises where they merge articles, create lists, or modify policies. Then I've seen inclusionists and deletionists where their main purpose on Wikipedia is to obstruct and game every system they can find in order to include/delete articles, regardless of quality... and otherwise attack and demonize anyone who doesn't agree with them.

And so I have a hard time listening to anyone from either side who is quick to say "the only way to fix Wikipedia is to get rid of the other guys".

Randomran00:10, 8 May 2010

Without the slightest foundation, you have dismissed me as being intent upon accepting any contribution regardless of its quality. Now that's demonisation. Deletionists run rampant on Wikipedia, deleting new articles within minutes or seconds of their publication, on wholly spurious grounds. There is no phoney consensus that needs to be built between reasonable civilised behaviour and vandalism. What is needed is a clear commitment to stop the vandalism.

Rubywine18:10, 8 May 2010

I haven't dismissed you for your content viewpoint. I'm pointing out that you will be unpersuasive if you represent your side as "reasonable civilized behavior" and represent the other side as "vandalism". This kind of vilification is a tactic employed by both deletionists and inclusionists, and this tactic doesn't work on people who haven't entrenched themselves in the battleground.

Randomran18:50, 8 May 2010

It's like talking to a brick wall. You are so rigid and bureaucratic it's not true. Did you read what I said? Articles are deleted within seconds of publication. Without discussion. Describing that as vandalism isn't vilification. For your information, I am not entrenched in the debate. I rarely ever visit Wikipedia. I was driven away from it two years ago by deletionists, like a lot of other people I've met since, in real life.

Rubywine20:36, 8 May 2010

It's not like talking to a brick wall, it IS a brick wall. It's impossible to open the door to a real discussion and real solution if there isn't a deeper and broader look at the whole debate.

I actually agree with you that a lot of articles are deleted too quickly. And even for the articles that are rightfully deleted -- like biographies of living people that are entirely built from an editor's personal feelings -- I agree that it has led to a bad first impression for many editors. But you're going to hit a wall if your entire argument is "I side with the inclusionists". Maybe you were lucky enough not to see it, but there's a lot of rotten behavior on both sides of the debate.

Randomran00:52, 9 May 2010
 
 

First, i think the whole inclusion/deletion philosophic debate is rather off topic because that mostly focused around the English Wikipedia while recommendations are meant to be implementable in every single Wikipedia. There are Wikis where inclusion/deletion debate is near-non existent. Your view is over English wiki centric.

Second, the Foundation has not a word to say on the current editing ideologies running across the Wikies. Thus the Foundation will certainly not take a position in the inclusion/deletion philosophic debate. If the Foundation has to take a position, it will be to tighten its view over the verifiability of the contents. The Foundation will certainly do it with the BLP related contents over every Wikis.

KrebMarkt19:05, 8 May 2010

I haven't got the slightest idea what any of that means. You're speaking a foreign language to me.

Rubywine20:43, 8 May 2010

Let me see if I can help translate (I am not endorsing his opinion, just explaining it as I understand it): Your issues are very specific to the English-language Wikipedia. Wikipedias in other languages don't all have the kind of problem you're talking about. The Wikimedia Foundation is interested in strategy as it applies to every language's Wikipedia. They are not going to take a side in the inclusionists vs. deletionists fight. The last two sentences I'm not 100% sure of, because I don't know how one "tightens a view." Hopefully KrebMarkt will explain.

Noraft21:35, 8 May 2010

Thanks Noraft. I appreciate your help.

Rubywine03:06, 9 May 2010
 

Clarifying my awful English.

The area where the Foundation is the most inclined to take a position is on the Verifiability of the contents and its going for a stricter interpretation of the Verifiability policy starting with the BLPs related contents.

Why i'm writing about Verifiability? Well more than 80% of the contents on all Wiki are unsourced thus could be removed at sight. I find rather ironic to fight over articles which could end up as dried husks because the contents failed to be asserted with reliable sources.

In my perception Verifiability is way scarier than any inclusion guidelines currently in application over every Wikis.

KrebMarkt06:22, 9 May 2010

Verifiability is one of those "paper tigers" I mentioned. You're a hundred times more likely to be criticized for asking a reasonable question on the article Talk page than for adding an unsourced fact to the article itself. An unverifiable fact is at risk of being deleted someday, but in political articles a controversial fact will get deleted in five minutes no matter how many sources you have for it. (By political articles I mean narrowly, BLPs of politicians and articles about political beliefs, groups, or concepts — curiously, articles that don't fall into this precise category, like An Inconvenient Truth, seem immune to this problem, as if no one is paid to watch them)

Wnt23:15, 9 May 2010

Verifiability isn't a paper tiger or you can count the whole English wiki unsourced BLPs drama as a non-event.

And there is the Verifiability scorched earth tactic.

You have a "grudge" with an article that ended with a no consensus in AfD, tags fews unsourced facts with the local wiki "citation needed" tag variant.

Wait a week or two if the facts are still unsourced remove them. Repeat the two steps again and again until the article is completely botched and the closest thing to an empty husk.

People can fight as much as they want over articles, it's not much a problem. However if such conflicts expand over contents using Verifiability as a weapon of mass blanking then we will have a hell time.

KrebMarkt06:16, 10 May 2010

Yes, a completely unverified article can be scratched; my point is, no one ever goes to a contributor's talk page and tell him that if he keeps entering unverifiable data "you will be blocked from further editing" and so on. And many completely unsourced articles do remain (I'm not saying that's actually a bad thing, btw, just that different policies have very different levels of enforcement and these aren't indicated to the new user).

Wnt16:56, 10 May 2010
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Allow me to explain my view of the never-ending inclusionist-deletionist debate, that appears to exist in almost every project. What we have is two groups of people who have fundamentally different views of what something being included really means for the project.

An inclusionist will look at a page up for possible deletion, and finds value in the page. They see an useless addition as being a small problem, and so long as the page adds value, the page should be kept. What if someone might find the page useful? Someone really worked on this, to help people. How could this just be tossed out like that? It is added content, a clear improvement, unless of course it is a totally useless page. Why would anyone favor deletion, unless absolutely necessary? These deletionists really need to be stopped, the situation is awful.

A deletionist sees a project. Thousands, millions of pages, all grouped together, every page another drop of water filling an ocean, another grain of sand on the pile. It continues to grow, continually, with more being added all the time. The content is taken care of by Wikimedians who work at it so much, removing what is harmful to the project at large. Naturally, when seeing an addition up for deletion, the thing to look at is whether it poses a threat to the rest of the project. Is the content up to standards, helpful, the kind of thing we want the project to look like? What if the project was completely open to this kind of content? Is this the kind of thing we want? If endless amounts of content like this were to be added, would it be helpful or harmful? The single grain of sand on the pile is insignificant, and should be kept if it really is a helpful contribution, what the content should be like. Otherwise, the correct course of action is to remove it, correct the problem, and protect the rest of the content fully. A project cannot function with a community that keeps every useless bit of junk that someone throws in. Someone needs to keep everything clean. Why are there all these people trying to fill the project with junk, keeping so much that shouldn't be kept?

The continual debate can not end. A project filled entirely with either of these perspectives would end in disaster. Any "fix" will be unhelpful.

--Random ranting person23:52, 9 May 2010

This is a pretty responsible look at the debate. We need people who want a broad amount of content, and we need people who make sure that there are some minimum quality standards in place. I agree that the debate cannot "end". But what I would like to see is for the two sides to be organized in a way that maximizes the benefits of both sides, and minimizes the friction.

I've seen it work on a small scale: a deletionist finds a bad article that probably can't stand on its own two feet, while an inclusionist says that they should work together to merge it somewhere else. Or a deletionist finds a whole topic area that is just blatant promotion and original research, and an inclusionist comes in to request a few months while BOTH editors look for sources. In both cases, the end result is that we cover a lot of content, and still meet some basic level of quality.

That's the real "end" to this debate. Not that one side wins, but that both sides are organized in a process where they can work together.

Randomran (No relation to random ranting person)00:42, 10 May 2010

Actually we could put this into into a formal algorithm like this one: if the deletionist believe an article is below quality minimum its tagged and gets a long time (like half a year) to get over this minimum quality. If it hasn't jumped over the minimum by then it is transferred to the archive. Actually different quality classes could deliver this right away. If somebody only want to look at class A articles he might restrict his own view on wikipedia to only class A articles.

The rationale behind is: server space is cheap and getting cheaper everytime. One can afford to keep almost everything easily. However not everything is equal, not an measures of quality.

134.76.223.208:39, 10 May 2010

I agree that time can be a big part of getting deletionists and inclusionists to work together, and balance quality and scope. Rather than putting things to a vote, you flag it as a concern, and depending on the article you give time to address the concern. Controversies and hoaxes would get very little time because they can damage Wikimedia's reputation, but more neutral content might have more time to improve. Newer articles might get more time, but articles that have existed for a longer time with no improvement might get less time.

Of course, we can't just force this compromise down peoples' throats. But I suspect that if you locked inclusionists and deletionists into a room together and didn't let them out until they compromised, they might agree upon something like that.

Randomran18:24, 10 May 2010
 
 

You know, what this is just sort of struck me. Inclusionism is like "manufacturing" and deletionism is like "quality assurance." And in the business world you rarely have the same people do both, because there is is often a conflict of interest.

Noraft03:50, 11 May 2010

That's an excellent metaphor. I hope you don't mind that I intend to spread it like mad.

Hans Adler08:43, 11 May 2010

I wrote it up in more detail, in an essay. That should make it easy to cite on talk pages. Feel free to edit it if you have something to contribute. If I get two or three supporting editors, I'll move it into Wikipedia space. Noraft 19:03, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Noraft19:03, 12 May 2010

It's a good essay. I think for a lot of people to swallow it (especially the inclusionists and deletionists themselves), there has to be an acknowledgment that these approaches can go "haywire" when they become more interested in "beating the other side" than finding a way to achieve their broader goal. "Quality control" can still be satisfied if the article is improved or merged to create a better article with less fluff, but sometimes they will insist on deletion because they are caught up in the battleground. "Manufacturing" can still be satisfied if some of the good content is preserved through a merge or by a mention in another article, but they might insist on keeping a separate article just because they are caught up in the battleground.

Randomran23:13, 12 May 2010

Right. We have to keep in mind that the point of manufacturing is to produce products that will sell and the point of QA is to ensure the quality said products, also so they will sell.

Noraft09:37, 13 May 2010

Yeah, it makes perfect sense to me. I just wouldn't be surprised to see an inclusionist or deletionist read that essay and start ranting about how the other side has become disruptive, and that this essay doesn't describe how they act at all. But this essay is more about how people should act (and in a lot of cases, how they do act), than how they act 100% of the time.

Randomran14:20, 13 May 2010