Criticism
Documentarian Jason Scott has noted the large amount of wasted effort that goes into deletion debates. Being called an inclusionist or deletionist can sidetrack the issue from the actual debate, which may contribute to community disintegration, restriction of information, or a decrease in the rate of article creation that suggests a decrease in passion and motivation amongst editors. Nevertheless, some have observed that the interaction between the two groups may actually result in an enhancement of overall quality of content.
Startup accelerator and angel investor Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has written on a page listing "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" that deletionists rule Wikipedia:
Deletionists rule Wikipedia. Ironically, they're constrained by print-era thinking. What harm does it do if an online reference has a long tail of articles that are only interesting to a few people, so long as everyone can still find whatever they're looking for? There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica.
Novelist Nicholson Baker recounted how an article on the beat poet Richard Denner was deleted as "nonnotable", and criticised the behaviour of vigilante editors on Wikipedia in New York Review of Books. The article has since been restored.
There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking people's work – even to the point of laughing at non-standard 'Engrish'. They poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away." —Nicholson BakerSuch debates have sparked the creation of websites critical of Wikipedia such as Wikitruth, which watches for articles in risk of deletion. Wikinews editor Brian McNeil has been quoted as saying that every encyclopedia experiences internal battles, the difference being that those of Wikipedia are public.
In 2009, Wikipedia began to see a reduction in the amount of edits to the site, which some called a result of user frustration due to excessive deletionism.
Read more about this topic: Deletionism And Inclusionism In Wikipedia
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)