User:Uncle G/The "dirty '-ista's"

Back in 2009 I gave Wikipedia's answer to Godwin's Law:

The only times that people use "deletionist" and "inclusionist" is to call other editors names. Their use has never improved a discussion. Any editor who resorts to such name calling is indicating that xe has run out of proper, valid, arguments to make.

I described this as people crying "You dirty -istas!" and noted that I, personally, espouse no "-ist" philosophy other than "encyclopaedist", as do (per per TenOfAllTrades the year before for example) the overwhelming majority of editors here. Those who repeatedly call other editors names do not understand this, but need to. To most of us, this really, truly, is not a battleground. We're not here to win some form of "moral victory" about one particular mechanism in some wiki software. We're here to write an encyclopaedia.

The sad truth is that the name callers do not realize is that they are actually adopting a joke religion. The "dirty -istas" are solely names for name calling. They are not and were not ever genuine philosophies or valid analyses of Wikipedia editors.

Background

The early deletion mechanism

Back in the early days of Wikipedia, the deletion mechanism was a cause of significant controversy. A brief précis of the history is:

Originally, deletion could only be done by developers reaching directly into the MySQL database and running DELETE statements to erase the records for revisions. Then grew MediaWiki and an actual deletion mechanism that users of MediaWiki could use themselves. However, there was still no undeletion at first; that came along later.
Deletion in MediaWiki moved revisions into a "deleted revisions" table which developers regularly emptied, losing deleted revisions forever. Developers were still cautioning about this in 2007, but as far as I am aware the last time that the deleted revisions table was emptied was in June 2004, and that was a side-effect of another problem, which might have been the case in December 2003, the preceding time that it was emptied, when there were other server problems.
Deletion was restricted to a subset of users, entrusted with what was (back then) seen as a tool liable to cause much damage. Unfortunately, software developers being what they are, the names given to such users were chosen by developers for developers. Such users were "sysops" even though they did not operate any computer system, and "administrators" even though they did not administer anything. ("Bureaucrats" and "Stewards" are equally misleading names in the same vein.)
The idea of a deletion log was a later addition, too. Initially, hand-maintained pages on the wiki were the deletion log.
Add to this the problems caused by the controversial additions of biographies of victims of the 9/11 attacks and the worries over Rambot (talk · contribs) and its ilk.

So in 2003 deletion was controversial, for reasons that mostly stopped applying a couple of years later. People had had their work erased forever, with no potential for even private retrieval if the database was cleared. The hand-maintained deletion log was imperfect. There was little trust in the people who were trusted to use the tool, on the parts of some people who did not have connections to the inner circles of the developers, Larry Sanger, and Jimmy Wales. And people were discussing potential future events^b like someone mass-creating 100,000 one-liner articles.^[1]

Stevertigo

Stevertigo was a fountain of oddball ideas, from the get-go. I won't go into the long history of it all, except to observe two things.

First, do not come away from reading Project:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Stevertigo 2 and Special:Diff/674501755#User:Stevertigo thinking that this was a later problem that was "adopted". This was actually the behaviour all along, as some of the more experienced editors at the time of that case could have attested.

Second, some of these oddball ideas are still hanging around, lurking in unvisited corners of the project namespace here and on Meta at m:Academic standards disease (neé m:Academic standards kick). Some, like Wikipedia:Ratings and rankings system (MfD discussion) have been deleted. One of note is the 2003 Wikipedia:Toothpaste principle, which asserted in its early revisions that "It shall be nearly impossible to delete completely an article once is has been written.", because toothpaste cannot be put back into a toothpaste tube. Fortunately, most of the oddball idea articles have been rewritten, refactored, or deleted; although occasionally one pops up.

The invention of a religion

In 2003, Stevertigo had another one of these dozy ideas, a page m:Deletionism on Meta that xe used to call people in favour of actually deleting stuff the name "deletionists". In response four days later Angela took the mickey out of it by creating m:Inclusionism.

At the time, these labels were derided as inaccurate^[2] and bogus^[3]. There was no research put in; this stuff being just made up. No-one self-identified as either one, even Stevertigo only self-identifying as someone who opposed those who xe name-called "deletionist"^[4], as both were misrepresentations of what the actual issues were. The fact that the discussion went into the territory of Adolf Hitler (thanks to Jimmy Wales, no less^[5]) indicated how poor the discussion was, and the nominal avoidance of "[c]alling them 'abortionists' for what they do to baby articles"^[6] was a plain indication that this was name-calling pure and simple.

The daft idea and the joke grew into two "associations" on Meta, that people could sign up to; with a third association the m:Association of Mergist Wikipedians and a fourth the m:Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn't Mean They Are Deletionists.

Unfortunately, far too many people who came along in later years, even as early as 2004, didn't realize that it was all the result of nonsense originating from the same stable as the baloney that is Project:Concept limit does.^a It was, alas, too easy to just believe that something on Meta was a credible and proper analysis of WikiMedia culture, even though it was not and never had been.

Eventually, people outwith Wikipedia picked up on this, and by a process of citogenesis, this nonsense finally made it into an encyclopaedia article in 2008 as Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia (AfD discussion), something that had been resisted at Deletionist (AfD discussion) and elsewhere until the journalists got hold of a juicy conflict to fill space with.

What the people outwith Wikipedia failed entirely to pick up on, on some of their parts probably out of enthusiasm for attention-grabbing coverage of a polarized two-party debate, is that the membership of the three supposedly major organizations was dwarfed by the membership of the fourth, which has zero mention in Wikipedia to this day, almost twenty years after Stevertigo inventing this stuff from thin air. A lot of people within Wikipedia recognized that none of the three were actually valid or properly documented philosophies; but none of the researchers, who clearly didn't do enough research to find the elephant in the room, or journalists did.

One example: Greg Myers, Professor of Rhetoric and Communication at Lancaster University, in 2010 declared the minor inclusionist and deletionist associations to be serious, ignored the mergist association entirely, and got things entirely backwards by declaring that the fourth association to be "presumably a joke"; without realizing that it is a clear sign that people reject this analysis and reject the name-calling, and without noticing the origins of the minor associations.^[7]

Footnotes

^a I keep a page at User:Uncle G/Missing encyclopaedic articles that has a list of articles that not only do we not have, but we did not even know, until they were listed there, we didn't have because they were not linked in article space nor on any project-space to-do lists. It was still getting new additions over a decade after Stevertigo proposed that Wikipedia had hit a "concept limit".
^b These things have since actually come to pass. Witness the events surrounding Project:Reliability of GNIS data. The sum total of GNIS and GEOnet creations, over several prolific editors, is comfortably over 100,000. One editor alone did some 81,000 articles.

Cross-reference

^ Wales 2003b.
^ Lih 2003.
^ Moeller 2003.
^ Stevertigo 2003.
^ Wales 2003a.
^ Saintonge 2003.
^ Myers 2010, pp. 25–26.