I'm just saying, wikipedia most likely can't and probably shouldn't contain an article about everything. It's just not possible, nor desirable, although it makes a good quote. It seems like deleting useless crap is one approach to that, and encouraging editors to contribute more to non-nerd-lore topics is another approach.
encouraging editors to contribute more to non-nerd-lore topics
Surprise! Deleting Star Wars articles doesn't create more content for the article about the large-tailed antshrike.
And guess what? I don't even like Star Wars, and I think the lack of information on, you know, real stuff (in contrast to "nerd-lore topics") is disheartening. So lay off with the kind of presumptions you're throwing around in these comments.
I realize deleting one thing does not create a different thing.
I agree it was more of a tangential quote and not a direct counter, but I was trying to point out that some of this "deletionism" is probably due to a recognition that not everything is being covered equally, and it might be nice to prune the leaves from time to time to encourage growth in new directions. Or something like that. Also, I'm not trying to speak for anyone else but myself, everything I said was just my own musing about the topic. However, I do have a feeling that if the first 10 years of wikipedia was represented by your quote, the next 10 years might be represented by mine. The goal seems to be growing up and encouraging people, which seems like a good idea, considering all the rage generated by this topic. If it can't contain everything then what it does NOT contain is going to be a deliberate choice by the community, and this whole thread seems to be dominated by one side of the argument so I thought I'd throw in a tangent. Thanks for the thoughtful comments though, and I should probably have put more thought into my own comments, I was just commenting in the spur of the moment.
...it might be nice to prune the leaves from time to time to encourage growth in new directions
Could you explain the mechanism by which that would work?
Do you expect that the person contributing articles about Star Wars will, after his article on Boba Fett's brother in law is deleted, decided to write an article about critical feminist post-industrialist theory?
You have won the internets today sir. It's true, my attitude has been truly eclipsed today, and my quote crushed.
Let me present the spoils of battle to the victor... I will immediately start writing a program that will recursively search wikipedia, perform a google search and then feed those results BACK into wikipedia automatically. Then it will surely be all-encompassing, no? Even better, version 2.0 will automatically categorize that knowledge and as a side effect I will have created Artificial Intelligence. No thanks necessary!
And I hereby swear to never again think that an encyclopedia written and maintained by humans should have a breadth of topics organized at a scale that makes sense to other humans, that's deletionist wrongthought!
(I do apologize for the sarcasm, but seriously not really)
You'd do well to comprehend what I've written. By saying "my attitude has been truly eclipsed today", you're framing what I've written as a petty attack on you, which it was not.
Striving for "the sum of all human knowledge" necessarily implies a compendium that includes "ancient Chinese poetry" written by a diversified community with editors who are "not tech geeks".
My point is that you tried to retort with a completely sideways quote as if it was at odds with the one I used, when it's not. If you've achieved the sum of all human knowledge or are working towards it, you've already picked up or are continuing to pick up along the way the types highlighted in the quote you used. It's not taking a new direction, because you were already traveling in all directions.
Its not a counterpoint. Unless you're trying to pass off that new editor intimidation is caused by too many articles.
Heres a tip: I'm not an editor anymore and it didn't have anything to do with intimidation from the size of wikipeida, it had to do with intimidation with the huge stack of wikipieda policies I was going to have to master to try and navigate around the busybodies running the place just to fix up some articles.
Fine, jeez. I should have found a better quote, maybe. I spent 10 seconds grabbing a quote from an article written two weeks ago about this subject, because I think it's related. And it's NOT the concrete number of articles, it's about encouraging more and different types of contributors besides the policy lawyers. I was TRYING to say the same thing you are saying, and all the rest of this just shows I have a lot to learn about the internals of wikipedia (I know nothing about how they work, really)
I'm just saying, wikipedia most likely can't and probably shouldn't contain an article about everything. It's just not possible, nor desirable, although it makes a good quote. It seems like deleting useless crap is one approach to that, and encouraging editors to contribute more to non-nerd-lore topics is another approach.