The motivations behind deletionism is perhaps best expressed by what Cyan calls his definition of "unencyclopedic":
when I say an article is "unencyclopedic", basically, what I mean is a combination of these two ideas:
It is a concept explicitly based in comparison to dead-tree encyclopedias, which Wikipedia is not--the same misguided motivation behind agglomeration.
Dead-tree encyclopedias share one universal bias towards information--a bias away from the trivial. There is a core physical limitation on how much information can be included, so there must be a high bar set for the size of the audience for any individual piece of knowledge.
But Wikipedia does not share that limitation, and its goal is include knowledge without approving a bias.
It is impossible for any reference work, including Wikipedia to avoid the bias of exclusion of information, simply because Wikipedia cannot include everything, because if it did, it would be everything. Thus Borges's cautionary parable about the perfect map:
However, that should not stop up from this accuracy being our eventual goal. The bar for relevance can be set much, much lower than that for the paper encyclopedia. And Wikipedia has a built-in standard--interlinking. Any piece of knowledge so trivial that it cannot be connected to knowledge already in Wikipedia should not be included.
The only practical limitation for inclusion in Wikipedia is title collision--the "3000 Michael Jordans" scenario. Again, a classic problem of the limitations of symbol vs. object. All those Michael Jordans are unique; it is only their names which are indistinguishable.
The motivations behind deletionism is perhaps best expressed by what Cyan calls his definition of "unencyclopedic":
when I say an article is "unencyclopedic", basically, what I mean is a combination of these two ideas:
It is a concept explicitly based in comparison to dead-tree encyclopedias, which Wikipedia is not--the same misguided motivation behind agglomeration.
Dead-tree encyclopedias share one universal bias towards information--a bias away from the trivial. There is a core physical limitation on how much information can be included, so there must be a high bar set for the size of the audience for any individual piece of knowledge.
But Wikipedia does not share that limitation, and its goal is include knowledge without approving a bias.
It is impossible for any reference work, including Wikipedia to avoid the bias of exclusion of information, simply because Wikipedia cannot include everything, because if it did, it would be everything. Thus Borges's cautionary parable about the perfect map:
However, that should not stop up from this accuracy being our eventual goal. The bar for relevance can be set much, much lower than that for the paper encyclopedia. And Wikipedia has a built-in standard--interlinking. Any piece of knowledge so trivial that it cannot be connected to knowledge already in Wikipedia should not be included.
The only practical limitation for inclusion in Wikipedia is title collision--the "3000 Michael Jordans" scenario. Again, a classic problem of the limitations of symbol vs. object. All those Michael Jordans are unique; it is only their names which are indistinguishable.