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The mathematician in the Jurassic Park movie, Dr. Malcolm, notes that despite all the efforts taken by the creators of Jurassic Park to control their dinosaurs, including their ability to reproduce, it won't work, because "life finds a way."[1]
The English Wikipedia currently has 6,821,858 articles. As of the current month, the project is growing at the rate of approximately 9922 articles per day. (see Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia.) That's net growth, after deletions including via proposed deletion and AfDs which close in delete.
You can often stumble across instances of previously deleted articles that were later recreated.[1] Articles about which even a small group of people care tend to be recreated, no matter how often deleted.
At a net growth rate of 9922 articles per day, as compared to, at most 100 articles per day proposed for deletion[2] (many of which don't make it 7 days without being "unprodded"), and maybe at most 100 articles nominated for deletion per day (many of which will be kept), this suggests that trying to improve Wikipedia through promoting deletion is futile. Outside of unverifiable articles -- self-written bios, articles about people that newspapers rarely mention, hoaxes, vandalism, attacks, and spam -- anything of interest to more than a few people returns in the long run. For every article deleted, more spring back to replace it, including eventually even the ones deleted.
So, if you find a verifiable article with a marginal claim to notability, and work to get it deleted, Dr. Malcolm would suggest you've underestimated humanity. The net benefit to the project of trying to delete articles outside the categories listed above are probably zero, and the opportunity cost (what you could have improved or written in the same amount of time) significant.
Notes edit
- ^ E.g., in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Benjamin "Coach" Wade, instances of articles on marginally notable contestants on the TV show Survivor can be found whose articles were deleted but later get reborn.
See also edit
- User:Mangojuice/delete: Essay on editor's deletion philosophy, including that "Deletion is a waste of time"
- User:Carrite#Stolfi_on_deletionism - comments excerpted from the BLP Death March of Early 2010
- User:Mike Cline/The Inclusionist's Guide To Deletion Debates
- User:Mike Cline/Archimedes was deleted