User:Jorge Stolfi/DoW/Deletions

Impact of Wikipedia's aggressive deletion policy on the recruitment of new editors

Since 2006 or so, Wikipedia has been assuming an increasingly hostile attitude against new editors. The hostility may not be intentional but seems quite substantial, and may be partly responsible for the dearth of new editors since that epoch.

Deleting articles for "non-notability"

The most conspicuous facet of this policy is the agressive deletion (as oposed to trimming) of articles on topics that are deemed to be "non-notable". The victims of this censorship have been many articles on minor literary characters, a large number of articles on real persons (including many liberal professionals, scientists, political figures, professional athletes, writers, singers, etc.), many articles on individual books, songs, albums, etc., emost elemetar and high schools, smaller towns, mountains and rivers, and many more. While the deletion of inappropriate text has always been a trivial and legitimate editor activity, and deletion of clearly inappropriate articles (such as duplicate pages on the same topic, or pages created with malicious intent) is an obvious necessity, since 2006 the view has generally prevailed that even articles with perfectly appropriate content and title should be quickly deleted if they are not "notable enough"

The deletion is ostensibly justified by a set of Wikipedia:Notability guidelines, but these are highly questionable on their own and have caused considerable attrition even among regular editors. Which is not surprising, since, as it turns out, the were drawn up by a very small (less than 2%) and self-selected subset of the regular editors. A proposal to delete an article is notified by placing a tag on the article; however, the discussion itself is not carried out in the article's talk page, but instead in a central bulletin board — which is much more likely to be read by general deletionists, than by the editors who contributed to the article; and is not usually seen by the general editor population. The decision is generally taken by an administrator, after a few weeks, based on a dozen votes. Often the whole process begins and ends before the interested editors have a chance to check their watchlists and take part in the vote.

Deletion of articles is permanent

Deleting an article is a much more radical and definitive action than deleting content. While deleted text is preserved in the article's history, and can be restored at any later time, the deletion of an article erases completely its history and every trace of its former existence. Therefore, if a new article gets deleted while its author is away from Wikipedia, he will not be able to fix the article so as to address the deletionist's concerns except by asking an admnistrator — which only experienced editors are likely to dare do (or know how to do).

On the other hand, the list of deleted articles remains accessible to administrators and "professional" deletionists. So, any attempt to re-create a deleted article, even if by a different editor and with a completely different content, is not only immediately undone, but also brings upon its the creator the wrath of the deletors, who automatically treat such events as vandalism.

Impact on new editors

This aggressive deletion policy must be falling very hard on novice editors. Discounting malicious activities, I suspect that the first article that a well-meaning but novice editor will want to create is usually on a minor topic that is close to him, such as his elementary school, his favorite anime character, etc.. This could be seen as a good sign: a careful, considerate and humble person will hardly choose geology of Mars or bryozoan as his *first* article. Unfortunately, the deletionist vigilantes will immediately pounce on any new articles on such minor topics, especially if they are created by new users. Therefore, a novice user is very likely to have his first article deleted — well before he can become bold and wise enough to contribute good articles on more "notable" topics.

It is easy to imagine the effect that the deletion of his first article will have on the motivation of that novice editor — who does not even understand clearly what "article deletion" means. Even if the article is kept, the humiliation of having one's work exposed to public critique on the cucking stool of the deletion list should be enough to turn away even the most self-confident expert. That will remove remove most of his motivation to contribute to WP.

On the other hand, if we could get that editor hooked, he would probably contribute another 100 good articles and tens of thousands of cleanup edits over the next few years. The loss of all those contributions must be counted as a very real but invisible cost of deleting a single "non-notable" article, no matter how obvious it "non-notability" is. In retrospect, the measures implemented since 2006 to curb non-notable articles may have been like a farmer killing all the bees because they bothered the cherry pickers — and then finding that the trees stopped bearing fruit.

I could find no statistics on the number of articles that were deleted for "non-notability" alone. However, article deletion (for all reasons) may well be the only kind of editorial activity that has been increasing since 2006, as seen in User:Dragons flight's plots. Anyway, these numbers will not quite show the magnitude of the damage. If my model of how new editors are recruited is correct, each "non-notable" article that gets deleted may cause the loss to Wikipedia of a hundred good articles and 10,000 constructive edits to other articles, over the next 4-5 years. Not to mention the loss of the money that those editors would otherwise have donated!

What can be done

In order to replenish its dwindling editor base, Wikiperdia must becme MUCH more tolerant about articles about newbies, especially those that are merely "non-notable" or "too specialized".

As a minimum, there should be a waiting period of at least one year between the creation of a new article and any proposal to delete it that is based solely on the "non-notabilty" of its subject. That is hopeflully enough time for the article's creator to become a regular. After that time, having an article deleted will hopefully be no more disagreable than having a bad tooth removed...