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Criticism on Excessive Deletionism (if you don't like a few changes, revert all changes)[edit]
DocumentarianJason Scott has noted the large amount of wasted effort that goes into deletion debates.[1] Deletion debates may contribute to community disintegration[2], restriction of information[3], or a decrease in the rate of article creation that suggests a decrease in passion and motivation amongst editors.[4] Being explicitly called an inclusionist or deletionist can sidetrack the issue from the actual debate.[5]
Startup accelerator and angel investor Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, on a page of "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund", lists “More open alternatives to Wikipedia“, in which he laments:
Deletionists rule Wikipedia. Ironically, they're constrained by print-era thinking. What harm does it do if an online reference has a long tail of articles that are only interesting to a few people, so long as everyone can still find whatever they're looking for? There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica.[6]
Novelist Nicholson Baker recounted how an article on the beat poet Richard Denner was deleted as "nonnotable", and criticised the behaviour of vigilante editors on Wikipedia in New York Review of Books.[7][8] The article has since been restored.
There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking people's work – even to the point of laughing at non-standard 'Engrish'. They poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away."
— Nicholson Baker
Such debates have sparked the creation of websites critical of Wikipedia such as Wikitruth, which watches for articles in risk of deletion.[9] Wikinews editor Brian McNeil has been quoted as saying that every encyclopedia experiences internal battles, the difference being that those of Wikipedia are public.[3]
