Value, respect, and strive for diversity in editors

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