Value, respect, and strive for diversity in editors

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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.