Wikipedia is (very, very broadly speaking) divided into two groups when it comes to the subject of what articles to include – inclusionists and deletionists. As the names may suggest, inclusionists tend to favour keeping more articles, deletionists tend to favour keeping fewer articles.
Each side has its rationale, strengths and methods. Inclusionists tend to work under the mandate that “Wikipedia is not paper” – we have no realistic size limit – and as such should feel free to include as much informative, useful content as possible. Furthermore, Wikipedia, if it wants to survive, needs to keep attracting new users and keep opening up subjects to write about, and neither goal is fulfilled by culling articles.
Inclusionists tend to rely on a variety of methods to push their point of view. The Secondary Notability Guidelines, or SNGs, provide for notability for verified achievements rather than for verified coverage, which the General Notability Guideline (GNG) requires; an actor may achieve notability if they have been covered by multiple, reliable sources in significant detail – under the GNG – or simply if they have been in, say, multiple noted productions under the SNGs – an achievement which does not require the same degree of coverage. As such, the SNGs are a staple of inclusionist work, because they provide for far broader inclusion rationales.
Other methods include trying to force more and more stringent requirements on users attempting to bring articles up for deletion, the expansion of the SNGs generally, and the much-maligned Article Rescue Squadron (ARS), which roves the wiki looking for articles to save – sometimes through fixing them up, and sometimes through complaining and hoping others will do the work for them.
Deletionists, on the other hand, believe that while Wikipedia is not paper, it is also not the Encyclopedia of Everything; for it to have purpose, it must be focused and updateable. This means that articles which do little but muddy the waters distract from our core purpose, and articles on things of insignificance, which are of interest to a tiny core of people, surround decent articles with swiftly outdated cruft which have no realistic chance of ever being brought up to date. Many deletionists also take issue with the extreme forms of inclusionism, which can in some cases undermine the core purpose of Wikipedia – to create a verifiable encyclopedia.
Methods and routes that deletionists use are in some respect more limited than those of inclusionists, which isn’t surprising given their position. Deletionists tend to rely on the GNG, which provides a narrower rationale for inclusion and ensures (in theory) that we only have verifiable content. They are not coherently organised in the same way that the inclusionists are, and consequently, seem to feel that they’re “losing the war” (although the same can be said of some inclusionists. I guess it’s simply a matter of perspective; anyone with an extreme opinion will suffer from some sort of persecution complex or inability to convince others of his viewpoint’s validity, regardless of what that extreme opinion is).
For reasons I don’t quite understand, I’m normally classified as a deletionist. If you’d looked at my work, say, two years ago, this would certainly be the case, but I find it slightly amusing when some of the more extreme inclusionists sneer at my modern work and call me a deletionist – or, better yet, when said inclusionists note that I “had my inclusionist hat on” when I gave my presentation at Wikimania.
The reason this amuses me is that I have essentially the same eventual goals as the extreme inclusionists. Not the “Wikipedia is for everything” goal, sure, but I work damn hard to try and make Wikipedia a project which is inviting to new users, and easy for them to get involved in. In the short term, then, it would look like anyone who isn’t a rampant inclusionist is part of the problem – because inclusionism stands for trying to accommodate new users and their potential content.
Where this idea falls down is the methods. Inclusionists try to justify the inclusion of content through roundabout ways and additional notability guidelines. Inclusionists try to strengthen our rules, mandating What Must Be Done before an article can be nominated for deletion. This does not help newbies – it hinders them. Sure, those who create an article and find it at AfD may find it saved through your methods, but at what cost?
By creating additional guidelines and complex pieces of theory to justify inclusion, you’re making the learning curve steeper, increasing the number of policies. By mandating What Must Be Done you’re creating additional hoops for editors to jump through, increasing ire and difficulty. The result is that far from saving Wikipedia, the methods used have the potential to damn it further by exacerbating precisely the problems that have got us to our current dire state – the mass of rules and regulations a new editor is expected to wade through.
That’s why I support the General Notability Guideline only – and that’s why I’ll never be in the “inclusionist” camp. Because I have the strange belief that if we want to attract people currently scared off by Wikipedia, we have to make contributing easier, not harder – and that’s not served by doubling the size of the rulebook.