Dialectical Inclusionism
!#@!@^% deletionists are ruining Wikipedia. They’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
But what can we radical inclusionists do in the meantime?
The articles that do survive deletionism are useful, and important. Wikipedia remains a cultural treasure. So, the proper response to deletionism is not to boycott or withdraw from Wikipedia, but offer qualified support of the common base, all the while preparing for the eventual, inevitable, glorious inclusionist fork.
There’s been talk before of such forks, but none has yet taken off. A fork won’t happen tomorrow, and maybe not even next year. But that’s OK; inclusionist consciousness needs to spread. Eventually there will be far more contributors stung by deletionist wikilawyering than deletionists themselves, and then the time will be right.
The current generation of deletionists are but a transition phase, still hung up on Britannica-like definitions of ‘notability’ and ‘encyclopedic’.
The “sum of all human knowledge” will not contain deletionism, it will transcend deletionism. We will not bother to denounce it, we’ll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.
Deletionists, we will bury you.
Time to sharpen the knives for “Not Censorship But Selection” (see http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/basics/ALA_print_layout_1_388256_388256.cfm)? It made more sense when shelf space was limited, but even then, it was sometimes a thin argument.
OTOH, rating the quality of information might be useful….
Jeff Ubois
2010-03-18 at 16:35
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Notability, deletionism, inclusionism, ∞³ – Mike Linksvayer
2014-04-19 at 11:16