User:Nathanaeljones

I'm a software/web developer and code linguist. My blog can be found at http://nathanaeljones.com/

How I use Wikipedia, and why I am not a deletionist

I have noticed a increasing number of deletionists lately. This bothers me, because I find that those "low profile" articles are precisely what makes Wikipedia so valuable. On any given Google search, it is highly likely that you will see a result from wikipedia.org. Due to the concise nature of wikipedia content, I always read the corresponding wikipedia article before reading the actual site I am looking for. Often, something in the "see also" section will prompt me to look for an alternate solution, and thus save me time.

If we try to trim Wikipedia down to only those articles we find personally significant, then we risk destroying what wikipedia is famous for in the first place: fringe articles and esoteric information that can't be easily located anywhere else. If our aim is to puppet the typical desktop Encyclopedia, we will simply join the pile of "condensed" knowledge collections on the internet. I can probably get information about WWII, the Mayflower, Argentina, Benjamin Franklin, and Windows 95 in any encyclopedia in existence. I can get information about them from online encyclopedias. Wikipedia is not useful to me for its important articles. It's useful to me for its unimportant ones.

So why the minimalism? In design, minimalism is good. In summaries, minimalism is good. In interfaces, minimalism is good. But in references? No.

Text costs nothing. This page itself takes less than 2 kilobytes. Currently, hard drive space costs $0.31 per gigabyte. That's $0.0000003125 per kilobyte. So 1 million short articles cost $0.31. If we quadruple that number to account for RAID5 and backups, we get $1.24 per million.

I find it frustrating when users see fit to go on a purging spree, and blatantly disregard the guidelines.