User:Skomorokh/Dreamtime
Although many strain to discredit the distinction between inclusionism and deletionism as a false dichotomy[^], experience suggests that this is an overreach. Contributors who are drawn to the dilemma of inclusion can for the most part be sorted into those whose pre-rational instinct is to defend and expand content (and who will look for reasons to keep) and those for whom the overriding concern is to purge and to purify (and who will look for reasons to delete).[^]
And this is the crucial point, which must be reiterated over and over again: we cannot predict today what will be of use, interest, or value to future generations. The lesson of this insight is clear: document today all that you can as best as you can.
One of the facets of this project that is oft-bemoaned is recentism, but a long-term benefit of this will be that temporally-anchored topics whose interest-levels drop off precipitously, our articles are likely to be preserved substantially unchanged – a history written contemporaneously.[^] The upshot of this is that readers and researchers will have at their disposal contemporary crowdsourced accounts of a vast range of niche interest topics.
I ^ Like all dichotomies.
II ^ Your correspondent unabashedly belongs to the former camp. The rationalisations of this are manifold, but briefly:
- · At a fundamental level, it seems conceited and just mean to destroy, often without notice or consultation, something someone else has created for the good of others.
- · I have felt the sharp pang of deletion personally, and it is a memory that fades slowly.
- · Wikipedia is not and cannot emulate the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is a category error to conceive of it as an encyclopaedia in the narrow, classical sense of having a scope of "all an educated mind needs to know, and nothing further". The fundamental tenet of openness has determined that it is essentially, necessarily a creature of a very different type in two respects: insurmountable vastness and intrinsic unreliability (admittedly an outmoded standard). It is beyond the ability of any one human to read in their lifetime the entirety of the Wikipedia. If we accept these constraints – that we are not Britannica, the question arises: how can we be the best non-Britannica we can be? In my conception, the answer is clear: we document as much as we responsibly can (usual caveats).
III ^ Among your correspondent's pet hates are histories which impose the values of the author's time on the topic at hand. Revisionism has its place, but there is incomparable value in the first draft of unvarnished documentation.