The excessive deletion needs to end

Plain and simple, that would obliterate this problem. If something is true and at least somewhat referenced it should stay. The strict notability policy is trying to make wikipedia nothing but an electronic version of a hard copy encyclopedia. This is supossed to be more liberal, remember, wikipedia is not paper.

Why delete anything (that's not spam or false)? I've heard the excuse that it's a waste of space. Look, wikipedia keeps EVERY old revision of every gigantic page, what are some stubs gonna hurt?

I'm not making as strong of an argument as I thought I would, it's almost like I've been waiting for this to happen now I'm trying to say too much at once and it's not coming out well. 174.252.160.87 16:32, 13 March 2011 (UTC) Darn it this is me (Daniel Christensen 16:39, 13 March 2011 (UTC)), I'm supossed to be logged in globally.

Anyway, back when I started editing in 2008 I had no idea what I was doing. I got warned and my pages were not formatted right at all. I could have very easily gotten discouraged and left had I not founf the project to be so interesting. Luckily, for how bad I was doing I kind of "got away with it" for a while until I learned. Daniel Christensen 16:39, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

• If en:WP:Notability were not used, then English Wikipedia would become clogged with commercial ads, product pages, and sports news. Just look at how en:Google Knol turned into 99.999% commercial ads, with almost no articles about general topics. If not for the restriction of en:WP:N, then people would be flooding Wikipedia with 87 new flyers about "Another fundraiser in New York's Central Park this weekend" or more likely, "Footballer John Smith twisted leg in Saturday's game, expected to make full recovery for next week's big game - go go rah rah". Please remember that perhaps half of all articles are about sports: over 1.5 million enwiki articles are about association football (soccer), baseball, basketball, American football, tennis, swimming, Olympic Games, including all the players and all the scores in all the games played during the last 200 years. -Wikid77 20:24, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

There's been far too many deletionist issues on wikipedia, due to "notability" for notability no not be a problem.

The discussion here about deleting the article w/r to notability is a perfect example of the problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Old_Man_Murray

comments like

"The notability guidelines are what they are – they've been developed by hundreds if not thousands of editors and have had widespread consensus for years. If you feel like you have some new insight on the matter the place to raise it is Wikipedia talk:Notability, not here."

Do not help the situation.

I take it you have never waded into a topic area of nationalistic conflicts, so you've never experienced the spammage of articles on massacres, terrorist attacks, and analogies between bad guys X and Y, never mind the WP:COATRACKING of barely related articles. Deletion requires consensus, so filling wikipedia with propaganda is quite easy when there are two reasonably-sized camps, so the (garbage) content accumulates! Everybody wins, right? (Should the sum of all human knowledge include all propaganda?) Of course, nobody who understands the Wikipedia editorial process would ever bother reading that type of article, but the general public doesn't know, although the saving grace is probably that Joe Public doesn't care much about such topics either.

Is it a problem to have 1.5 million articles about sports on the English Wikipedia? I haven't been bothered much by them, if that is the number. About the only problem I have had with sports articles is that it seems nearly every search on a person's name ends up finding a footballer among the results, so there is an extra layer of disambiguations and hatnotes to click through sometimes. But that seems a small price to pay for attracting and retaining the (presumably) hundreds of thousands of editors who come here primarily to write about sports, some of whom may end up doing something useful.

For example, editors with a fervent interest in sports may also contribute to wiki infrastructure such as templates, help pages, answering questions on the Help desk, and other things that benefit all other topics. Wikipedia is such a well-developed wiki because it appeals to so many people who do not share our interests, who can all share their tools and innovations.

I can't think of a good argument for chopping off Wikipedia's Long Tail. We can have tens of millions of articles that hardly anyone looks at, except for small groups of people who care deeply about them. One example is articles of geographically local importance. I wish we had articles about every single identifiable object in the city where I live. Most of these topics would not be relevant to people outside my city, making them blood in the water to deletionists. Instead, we have to set up our city wikis outside the Wikimedia family to provide in-depth coverage of locally relevant topics, but this is inefficient since it requires duplicating Wikipedia's extensive infrastructure (templates, help pages, etc.) or doing without these goodies and having a bare-boned wiki.