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August 11, 2008

Deletionists will win many battles but the inclusionists are obviously winning the war

In Wikipedia terms, a culture clash has emerged between deletionists and inclusionists. Deletionists want to keep the bar relatively high. Recently they managed to delete the Port Macquarie Presbyterian Church, New South Wales, Australia, on grounds of non-notability, and the "List of Films With Monkeys in Them," on grounds of "listcruft." Still, even deleted articles survive, on Deletionpedia: 50,000 and counting.

Inclusionists, meanwhile, keep saying, "Wiki is not paper."

Things fission and multiply. The Wikipedia pages on Deletionism and Inclusionism will lead you, if you care to follow, to pages on Mergism and Incrementalism. Also to Factionalism -- because the factions have formed not only Associations of Deletionist Wikipedians and Inclusionist Wikipedians but also (can it ever end?) the Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn't Mean They Are Deletionists. Fighting back against deletions is the Article Rescue Squadron. "The deletionists should be aware that all their patriotic work is for naught, as one day all those articles are coming right back," says the user called Jidanni.

'It's a struggle that always came up at the margins," Mr. Wales says, "but as we become bigger and bigger and bigger it becomes a much larger thing." He worries particularly about Biographies of Living Persons, "a huge policy area for us that causes a lot of conflicts and a lot of complaints and a lot of complicated ethical concerns." The more obscure a person is, the harder it is to maintain quality -- to catch hatchet jobs, for example. Wikipedia insists on verifiable sources,meaning written sources, but more and more of the world's information is not written on paper; it is part of an oral or an online tradition.

Wikipedia has reached a delicate point, I think. Unlike trivial edit wars, the battle between deletionists and inclusionists has no clear path to peace, because ultimately both sides have a claim on Wikipedia's core values. The deletionists carry the banner of quality, of verifiability, of trust. The inclusionists say that more information is always better: Any article that can be deleted can be improved instead. Information glut? Bring it on. They quote Stanislaw Lem: "We want the Demon, you see, to extract from the dance of atoms only information that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines, blueprints, historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or how to clean and iron a suit of asbestos, and poetry too, and scientific advice, and almanacs, and calendars, and secret documents, and everything that ever appeared in any newspaper in the Universe, and telephone books of the future...."

To continue down the path of comprehensiveness, Wikipedia will need to sustain the astonishing mass fervor of its birth years. Will that be possible? No one knows. Certainly the fervor was on display in Alexandria. Mr. Wales himself tries not to take sides, but if the practical worries could be forgotten -- if Wikipedia had the resources to maintain the quality of even the most obscure entries -- he, personally, would open the doors even wider. The Library of Babel doesn't scare Mr. Wales. "I'd be happy to have, in theory, a good, neutral biography on every single person on the planet," he says. "I mean why not, right?"

The spectacular growth of pages in Wikipedia continues and though battles may continue between deletionists and inclusionists, it is oblivious that inclusionists are winning the battle of ideas. For example, entire worlds of fiction have their minutiae documented within the system and a massive number of minor academics and politicians have pages. I predict that the standard for inclusion will continue to decline over time. Obscure pages are less of a communal editing project and more likely to be a product of a lone face with his corresponding mistakes. Therefore, you'll just have to consume it thoughtfully, knowing that obscure pages have fewer eyeballs on them to catch errors and bias.

Posted by OneEyedMan at August 11, 2008 6:25 PM

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