User:The Cunctator/Deletionism

The motivations behind deletionism is perhaps best expressed by what Cyan calls his definition of "unencyclopedic":

when I say an article is "unencyclopedic", basically, what I mean is a combination of these two ideas:

• readers don't come to an encyclopedia looking for this information
• when readers see this material, it will adversely affect their opinion of Wikipedia as an authoritative and serious source of information

It is a concept explicitly based in comparison to dead-tree encyclopedias, which Wikipedia is not--the same misguided motivation behind agglomeration.

Dead-tree encyclopedias share one universal bias towards information--a bias away from the trivial. There is a core physical limitation on how much information can be included, so there must be a high bar set for the size of the audience for any individual piece of knowledge.

But Wikipedia does not share that limitation, and its goal is include knowledge without approving a bias.

It is impossible for any reference work, including Wikipedia to avoid the bias of exclusion of information, simply because Wikipedia cannot include everything, because if it did, it would be everything. Thus Borges's cautionary parable about the perfect map:

In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.

In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

However, that should not stop up from this accuracy being our eventual goal. The bar for relevance can be set much, much lower than that for the paper encyclopedia. And Wikipedia has a built-in standard--interlinking. Any piece of knowledge so trivial that it cannot be connected to knowledge already in Wikipedia should not be included.

The only practical limitation for inclusion in Wikipedia is title collision--the "3000 Michael Jordans" scenario. Again, a classic problem of the limitations of symbol vs. object. All those Michael Jordans are unique; it is only their names which are indistinguishable.