It’s over. The Deletionists won.<\/p>\n
“It\u2019s like I\u2019m in some netherworld from the movie Brazil, being asked for my Form 27B(stroke)6,” writes<\/a> the media scholar and long-time Wikipedian Andrew Lih. He’s describing what it’s like these days to contribute to Wikipedia, the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Lih recently noticed that Wikipedia lacked an article on Michael Getler, a reporter who now serves as ombudsman for the Public Broadcasting System. Lih added a brief entry – a “stub,” in Wikipedia parlance – assuming that other contributors would flesh it out in due course. Within minutes, though, one of the site’s myriad wikicops had swooped in and marked Lih’s entry as a candidate for “speedy deletion,” citing the site’s increasingly arcane legal code:<\/p>\n It is a very short article providing little or no context (CSD A1), contains no content whatsoever (CSD A3), consists only of links elsewhere (CSD A3) or a rephrasing of the title (CSD A3).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Lih’s reaction: “What the\u2026 what manner of\u2026 who the\u2026 how could any self-respecting Wikipedian imagine this could be deleted? I\u2019ve been an editor since 2003, an admin with over 10,000 edits and I had never been this puzzled by a fellow Wikipedian.” After some more digging, he discovered that the rapid deletion of new articles has become rampant on the site. Deletionism<\/a> has become Wikipedia’s reigning ethic. Writes Lih:<\/p>\n It\u2019s incredible to me that the community in Wikipedia has come to this, that articles so obviously \u201ckeep\u201d just a year ago, are being challenged and locked out. When I was active back on the mailing lists in 2004, I was a well known deletionist. \u201cWiki isn\u2019t paper, but it isn\u2019t an attic,\u201d I would say. Selectivity matters for a quality encyclopedia.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s a whole different mood in 2007. Today, I\u2019d be labeled a wild eyed inclusionist. I suspect most veteran Wikipedians would be labeled a bleeding heart inclusionist too. How did we raise a new generation of folks who want to wipe out so much, who would shoot first, and not ask questions whatsoever? It\u2019s as if there is a Soup Nazi culture now in Wikipedia. There are throngs of deletion happy users, like grumpy old gatekeepers, tossing out customers and articles if they don\u2019t comply to some new prickly hard-nosed standard.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But, given human nature, is it really so “incredible” that Wikipedia has evolved as it has? Although writers like Yochai Benkler have presented Wikipedia as an example of how widescale, volunteer-based “social production” on the Internet can exist outside hierarchical management structures, the reality is very different. As Wikipedia has grown, it has developed a bureaucracy that is remarkable not only for the intricacies of its hierarchy but for the breadth and complexity of its rules. The reason Deletionism has triumphed so decisively over Inclusionism is pretty simple: It’s because Deletionism provides a path toward ever more elaborate schemes of rule-making – with no end – and that’s the path that people prefer, at least when they become members of a large group. The development of Wikipedia’s organization provides a benign case study in the political malignancy of crowds.<\/p>\n\n
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