Talk:Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia

trivia

The information in the trivia sections is what people are usually here looking for. Deletionists are fools for getting rid of it for not being respectable enough.

Encouraging division

A lot of editors believe that labelling editors deletionist or inclusionist is counterproductive and leads to unnecessary division and conflict. As with politics, there are many nuances and shades of grey. An editor may not be inclusionist in all fields of knowledge for instance, only some of them. Most editors would say they consider each case on its merits. I see nothing substantial in the article discussing any of this.

In fact, the whole concept of deletionist v. inclusionist is now substantially out of date and this article ought to reflect that. Although it is still possible to identify an individual editor as being more or less inclusionist than another, the division dates back to the debates that eventually established notability as the primary basis for inclusion. Highly controversial at the time, and bitterly fought over, there is now hardly an established editor who does not implicitly accept notability as the golden rule. It is enlightening to examine the earliest version of the page that eventually became Wikipedia:Notability. That page does not use the word "notability" anywhere! Nor does it contain any principle that could be interpreted as our current understanding of notability. No mention of sources for instance (reliable or otherwise).

The challenges to notability as a principle largely come from new editors. Usually because they have just had their first article deleted or sent to AfD, or their draft has been rejected. New editors tend to argue from "importance" rather than "notability". Note the original title of the historical page I linked was "Importance". Perhaps we still haven't got this right, but it has become so well established that everyone here has become blind to the downsides. SpinningSpark 13:27, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

• This article is in mainspace, and so is naturally limited by what external sources say about the matter. If SS wants to debate such issues they should try pages like WP:INCLUSIONISM and WP:DELETIONISM, which are now on meta, as they are common to most Wikimedia projects. My understanding is that there's no consistent level found across the projects and so YMMV. Andrew🐉(talk) 16:57, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

• I don't want to open (or reopen) a debate, at least not right now. I want something written in this article. It seems unlikely that there are no RS on the evolution of notability here, and fairly probable that there is some discussion how that relates to deletionism. SpinningSpark 17:33, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

• Well, if you want to write something, it's best to start with a good source. Here's a recent paper based on "an analysis of 1,967,768 AfD discussions". Let's see what it says and then summarise it. I shall post relevant quotes as I read through it. Andrew🐉(talk) 17:42, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

1. "AfD participants cluster in two major groups, colloquially referred to as the ‘inclusionists’ ... and the ‘deletionists’ ..., which suggest the presence of substantial social bias in the AfD process overall."
2. "the administrators who close the discussions do have an effect on the final outcome."
3. " there are strongly polarized groups in the AfD community, and that the evolution of group structure in different cohorts of editors reflects different historical periods"
4. "In particular, we find that one group (strong deletionists) is much less susceptible to change than others."
5. "the proportion of Delete to Keep votes is roughly 68%, while for outcomes it is 77%. This suggests that delete votes are more decisive."
6. "4 main groups, roughly corresponding to the following classes of users: a) strong deletionists, b) moderate deletionists, c) moderate inclusionists and d) strong inclusionists."
7. "Editors who joined before 2007 tend to overwhelmingly belong to the more central parts of the network. These earlier cohorts are not only formed by more experienced and more active editors, but they are also the largest"
8. "Editors involved in AfD discussions adapt to a particular voting tendency early during their tenure in the AfD process. This is reminiscent of results from prior work, that found that highly active contributors are active from a very early stage. In the context of AfD discussions, this finding could potentially suggest the presence of social learning mechanisms, for example due to imitation. Also, strong deletionists seem more resistant to changing their opinions compared to other groups. More generally, an interesting open question is to determine which stable user characteristics in peer production systems are due to learning phenomena or to the presence of inherent individual traits."

• These are the key points I got from a first reading. Note that the corpus analysed was from 2005–2018 and was reasonably up-to-date. The main point that stands out for me is the 2007 watershed. Note that I started in 2006 while SS started in early 2007 and this fits the general finding. Andrew🐉(talk) 18:24, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
• Anyway, the paper seems to refute SS's hypotheses in that it shows that there are still distinct groups and that these were established fairly early in Wikipedia's life. So, what change should we make to the article? Andrew🐉(talk) 18:43, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

• Just going on your summary, the author seems pretty unknowledgeable in statistics and probability. I don't know about this page, but in the field I ususally write in we wouldn't use sources that are obviously incompetent. Plus it's a conference paper, so not peer reviewed and not the very best of RS. While you were writing that I was reading this book. I almost immediately came across two glaring factual errors about Wikipedia sources and deletion policy. So I'm not inclined to add anything to the article based on what I've seen so far. Perhaps there are no reliable sources for this. Perhaps I should be looking at sources already in the article with a view to having it deleted! SpinningSpark 20:15, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

• The main techniques used in the paper were those of social network analysis. As for deleting the page, this has been tried – see above. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:04, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

• My criticism has nothing to do with the source's analysis of social structures. My criticism is that it has drawn false conclusions from the statistics. Those numbers do not show that "delete votes are more decisive". On the contrary, those are precisely the results that would be expected, statistically speaking, if all votes were given equal weight. And a large proportion of articles surviving AFD is surely not an indicator of deletionist tendencies overall. Articles at AFD are those that are problematic and we expect to get deleted, and yet there is a 23% survival rate.

I'm not really planning on taking this to AFD, but if I did it would not be on the basis of the last AFD. That discussion centred around notability and I have no challenge to notability, I agree with that close. Rather, my rationale would be that the article is irretrievably biased, based on poor sources, and is thus a WP:TNT case. SpinningSpark 13:41, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

AfD outcome chart

The second chart in the lead ("All AfD outcomes over time, stacked as percentage") needs fixing – it currently claims that around half of AfDs are closed as "speedy delete". Comparing this chart to the original at User:JPxG/Oracle/All, it seems that the percentage figures are correct but the colours have been incorrectly labelled. I'm not confident enough with templates to fix this myself. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 09:38, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

I've removed the chart for now. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 21:08, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

Nicholas G. Carr

There is an interesting post "Deletionists, inclusionists and delusionists" by Nicholas Carr in his blog. I am wondering if it is a WP:RS. I would say yes because this blog entry is within his area of expertise. Opinons? - Altenmann >talk 20:59, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Carr doesn't mention that inclusionists require cites and sources for articles, and implies that inclusionists believe that anyone can put any article up about anything and it should stay. He seems pessimistic that Wikipedia cannot exist with both, and neglects those in the middle who help keep the boat righted and sailing. As for RS, maybe take it to the board where RS is decided, which can't be done here. Randy Kryn (talk) 22:40, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

"Eventualism" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Eventualism has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 January 5 § Eventualism until a consensus is reached. Jay 💬 14:23, 5 January 2024 (UTC)