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Wikipedia Disputes Editor Exodus Claims
eldavojohn writes "The Wikimedia blog has a new post from Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Erik Zachte, a data analyst, to dispute recent reports about editors leaving Wikipedia (which we discussed on Wednesday). They offer these points to discredit the claims: 'The number of people reading Wikipedia continues to grow. In October, we had 344 million unique visitors from around the world, according to comScore Media Metrix, up 6% from September. Wikipedia is the fifth most popular web property in the world. The number of articles in Wikipedia keeps growing. There are about 14.4 million articles in Wikipedia, with thousands of new ones added every day. The number of people writing Wikipedia peaked about two and a half years ago, declined slightly for a brief period, and has remained stable since then. Every month, some people stop writing, and every month, they are replaced by new people." They also note that it's impossible to tell whether someone has left and will never return, as their account still remains there."
I've had similar experiences.
I think the editors probably do a lot of good overall, but they tend to be heavy handed, deleting whole articles without warning rather than striking parts they find objectionable (which I think is more the intended role of the editor).
Further, I've seen cases where one editor will request better sources, and a second will just delete it (rather than nominate it for 7-day deletion). Kind of annoying.
That sounds like a bad experience, but it doesn't really have anything to do with deletionism. It's just a dispute over facts.
Deletionists are editors who think that Wikipedia shouldn't include "non-notable" information, and therefore delete it. Their argument is that the vast majority of the trivia that people try to add to Wikipedia every day has no interest to anyone but the person writing it, is impossible to verify, reduces the level of quality of the articles, is vulnerable to spamming, astroturfing and other manipulations, reduces the signal-to-noise ratio of the content, wastes the time of admins, and would hurt Wikipedia's image if allowed to remain. Reasonable people can disagree about where to draw the line (and about how this policy ends up being experienced by new and casual editors), but it's hard to dispute that a lot of the crap people post absolutely does not belong in anything calling itself an encyclopedia.
Editors trying to enforce their own preferred version of reality, or just locking down an article the way they like it, has a lot more to do with editor bias and personal fiefdoms. In my opinion that's worse than deletionism (though it's an easy trap to fall into; if you've spent hours crafting the introduction to an article until it's just right, and some random schmoe comes and changes it in a way that makes it worse--in your opinion--wouldn't you change it back?), but it's also against Wikipedia policy. If you had had the will or energy to fight it, and learn the ins and outs of the system, you could probably have prevailed in the end. I don't blame you for walking away, though. Who wants to deal with Internet bullies?