Andrew Lih » Blog Archive » Unwanted: New articles in Wikipedia

It used to be if an article was short, someone would add to it. If there was spam, someone would remove it. If facts were questionable, someone would research it. The beauty of Wikipedia was the human factor — reasonable people interacting and collaborating, building off each other’s work. It was important to start stuff, even if it wasn’t complete. Assume good faith, neutral point of view and if it’s not right, {{sofixit}}. Things would grow.

Today, {{sodeleteit}} is the norm. And it’s not with a smile, regret or even a note to the user. It’s usually in insultingly bureaucratic code: “Salt it… A7 and G11… DRV“.

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If anyone knows all the codes on the Deletion Criteria page, you are a danger to Wikipedia. You are a menace. Because it used to be that users thought about the value of an article first. As a thinking individual and Wikipedian, you were expected to decide based on its merit, rather than trying to shoehorn it into a deletion category.

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The community has gotten so big you cannot recognize people anymore. It lost the village feel a while ago, but it’s not even a town or city anymore, it’s on the cusp of becoming an impersonal bureaucratic slog depicted in Apple’s 1984 video.

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