User:GreenMeansGo/Contributionism

While their friends and neighbors are busy opining on the condition of other people's roofs, these folks are busy building a roof.

Some number of things need to be deleted. Some larger number of things need to be kept. Still yet an immensely larger number of things still need to be written. By at least one estimate, while the total number of existing articles is more than five million, the total number of notable topics is around 100 million. At the same time, as of 2018, around half of the articles that exist on the English Wikipedia are stubs, and so are little more than placeholders where an article hopefully will one day be written.

When you delete something, you're not really scoring a "win" for the project. Deleting something is always a net loss, because it means someone spent the time to create something, and the community had to spend the time to delete it, and the reader is no better off for all that time spent. From the perspective of the reader, it's as if none of it ever happened. In a perfect world, no one would ever create something that needed to be deleted, and so no one would ever have to delete it. And just because something regretful might be a necessity, doesn't make it any less regretful.

Conversely, when you help to keep something, you don't "get credit" for that thing existing. The credit goes to the one who created something worth keeping. Just because you reviewed a GA, doesn't mean you wrote a GA, and just because you !voted keep for an article, doesn't mean you actually contributed something worth keeping. There's a reason we don't feature our most spectacular feats of AfD prowess on the main page, and it's because readers don't care. And so if you want to balance your cosmic Wikipedia karmic ledger, the relevant calculation isn't the ratio of things deleted to things kept, it's the ratio of things deleted to things created.

At the end of the day, whether you have a bias toward deletion or a bias toward keeping, is never nearly as important as whether you have a bias toward creation, and the most important AfD statistic that never shows up on most people's radar, is the contributions that never got reverted, and the articles that never got nominated for deletion, because while your neighbors were busy opining on the quality of house next door, you were busy building a house.

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inclThis editor is a contributionist.