User:M0llusk
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After finding useful information here, I began to make small contributions. After making small contributions I began to notice missing pages, then after some time I began to notice that content that seemed to me to be correct, appropriate, and relevant was being deleted. After watching the deletion process in detail I found much being deleted using methodology that appears to be both fundamentally flawed and specifically not correct employment of the deletion policy. Now most of my work here is attempting to call attention to issues related to aggressive deletion.
Deletion policy is a complex balance because large amounts of junk is contributed which not only should be deleted, but must be deleted in order for Wikipedia to function. That said, Wikipedia requires the attention of contributors to be useful. Aggressive deletion risks loss not only of useful content, but useful editors as well.
What is wrong with deletion? In short, it is far too easy. Pages representing a great deal of work and ongoing improvement may be deleted simply because one or a small number of readers fail to understand the material or do not accept sources. While pages may be built up over a long time with negotiation, any kind of objection may lead at any time to deletion. The standard deletion time frame of five days is well understood by deleters and regularly used to void the contributions of weekend Wikipedians. This makes effective contribution to Wikipedia without daily intention challenging. Allowing simple objections from closed minds to power deletion means that any concept that is not simple or long understood and any conflict over correct sources means that Wikipedia will tend to be limited and heavily censored relative to its potential.
Examples are numerous. One of the better examples is the Business logic page. This documents a concept which came into general use around 1994, which is still important to commercial software development, and which when mastered can lead to high paying software jobs. People who are unfamiliar with this concept have been trying to delete the page. On the surface it may seem that the page not being deleted represents a victory for the deletion process, but it is not clear that is so. By frequently attempting to delete or question the need for this page the rate of contribution has been slowed. Numerous participants in the debate have noted a lack of books and papers discussing this subject, but this is related to its nature as a commercial tool rather than an academic exercise. Ironically, many entirely academic software concepts which have proven irrelevant to software industry are well documented here and because they have long published book sources.
How to fix the deletion process? There are no simple answers or it would already have been fixed. Some thoughts I have are that when a page has many authors and has accumulated edits that the amount of effort to delete the page should go up as the amount of effort put into creating it is increased. When deleting pages, especially those with multiple contributions, the authors of those pages should be notified that deletion is in process, and if at all possible deletion should be suspended for a period of weeks to enable a response. This is an extreme suggestion since the current five day period gets much discussion, but in my opinion pages that have had much attention and those that are just dropped down and left are quite different. Some kind of referee for working out conflicts might be helpful, as the process seems not always to be followed and poor reasoning is endemic. For example, it is frequently asserted that pages to be deleted are neologism, but if many Wikipedians built up a page in obvious disagreement then it should at least be necessary to mention what the page to be deleted is purported to be a neologism of.
What to do for now? Unfortunately, while Wikipedia has great potential for relevance, issues with editing and especially aggressive deletion put all that at risk. Since any material is likely to be deleted at any time simply because someone did not understand or would prefer other sources, it makes the most sense to create documentation outside Wikipedia and then import it as passing decades make it uninteresting. Once material has been in circulation for a while and books are out it becomes relatively easy to add it to Wikipedia, if necessary repeatedly. Social conventions, memes, and commerce as practiced in daily life are extremely challenging to document on Wikipedia because there may be conflict, lack of understanding, or in some cases no agreed upon printed reference materials.
-- M0llusk 08:28, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
