Aaron and Wikipedia

Aaron Swartz of RSS fame is currently having a rather heated debate on Wikipedia regarding their deletion policies possibly due to a page he contributed the extreme majority to which is now being considered for deletion, List of left-wing organizations in the USA. There is a wikipedia-thread about the topic. He seems to be of the opinion that pages should not be deleted, that there is no reason for them to be, they should only be blanked and the system should interpret that as there being no page there. (mediawiki, the software wikipedia uses, styles links to non-existant pages differently). He also thinks that instead of protecting a page during an edit war the users that join the edit war should be punished somehow, probably temporary banning.

This concept for deleting pages has been discussed, Pure wiki deletion system (proposal) and I generally think it is a good system for small wikis. I am unsure how it would scale to wikipedia, there are up to 10 new pages created every few minutes, and people who delete them nearly constantly. Many of the pages are nonsense. The majority of new pages created are candidates for speedy deletion, and are thusly deleted. Having the hardware store all these pages forever because we can’t delete things because it sometimes makes people mad seems like a poor decision.

The real debates happen in another area, meant for pages that probably don’t belong, but are not obvious nonsense, this is where the List of left-wing organizations in the USA found itself. I think this controversy stems from a misunderstanding about the culture of wikipedia. They have community standards, and value consensus a great deal. In many respects it is different from most wikis where any information is valued, some data being better than others, but all worthwhile with the ideal of open information. Wikipedia, balances this common net view of as-much-info-as-possible with some other ideals that it sets higher. Neutrality, notability, validity, consensus are all more important to wikipedians. It is accepted practice to delete non-neutral parts of articles if they are not salvagable, and articles whose notability is questioned will have that notability discussed with the deletion of the article as a possible outcome.

These ideals wikipedia sets up for itself are important for it to be trusted, and for it to be a non-partisan neutral source of information. I do not think these ideals are applicable or beneficial for the wider internet, but they are for the goals that wikipedia sets up for itself.