Removed?

[Andrew Wiley]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 1:56 AM, Daniel Gibson <metalcaedes at gmail.com> wrote:
> Am 15.02.2011 01:05, schrieb bearophile:
>>
>> Nemerle and Factor removed from Wikipedia? What are those deletionists
>> doing?
>>
>>
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fkt7t/nemerle_factor_alice_ml_and_other_programming/
>>
>> Is D page too at risk of deletion?
>> (Months ago those sick people have deleted some pages written by me in
>> hours or days. This is not nice).
>>
>> Bye,
>> bearophile
>
> Wikipedia has become a horribly broken system with a lot of idiots.
> IMHO something is notable if somebody wants to write about it.
> Wikipedia is no printed encyclopedia where you only have limited space..
> something like Wikipedia is *the* chance to collect all kind of knowledge,
> even about stuff you hardly find information about anywhere else.
> But those censors screw it up by deleting all kinds of articles because it's
> not notable or has no accepted sources/references (accepted sources are,
> ironically, mostly dead tree publications).
>

No, they have a point. That philosophy doesn't work because at some
point, there's too much information. Too much to edit to make sure it
meets standards, too much to browse (if the links are bad enough to
parody with the Wikipedia game, how bad would they be with unlimited
content?). When you open that door, useful content gets drowned in
floods of things like useless biographies and advertisements for
things no one has heard of.
If you take a look at the discussion for the notability requirements,
no one really likes them, but no one has really found a better way to
define what's notable than to require it to have valid sources.
Without those sorts of requirements, Wikipedia becomes chaos.