Off topic, but I have never understood Wikipedia's intense drive to rid itself of anything interesting or unusual or esoteric. It's text in a database, you're not running out of space, nor are you diminishing the quality of other articles!
I'm much more an inclusionist than a deletionist. Still, taken to an extreme, it's not hard to see the problem with a vast number of articles about obscure and hard to verify topics that are poorly maintained. They're just text in a database but they can bring down the overall level of the encyclopedia.
Yeah, I think poorly maintained or particularly obscure articles should simply be flagged as such for the user. If it's really poor or has major problems which cannot be fixed, sure, go ahead and delete it, but deleting documents just because they're rarely accessed doesn't seem like the point of Wikipedia. At the very least, the content could be put into a long term archive of some sort instead of outright deleted. I mean, database partitioning exists for a reason.
Maybe they could have something like the 'show comments rated over x' feature on Slashdot? By default you only get curated high quality articles but you can choose to lower the bar?
It's an encyclopedia; its content should be encyclopedic. A website that holds on to everything else would be something different. While that's also fine, it's a different project with a different goal.
If the content starts to touch topics which are too niche, there is a risk that no-one will be able to verify it and the information will become unreliable.
Where would be a good place to actually store that niche knowledge? I agree that it doesn't really belong on Wikipedia... But it could still be valuable. Maybe even more valuable than "normal" content because if it's lost it's lost for good.
In an ideal world, on the free decentralized web of interconnected webpages indexed by search engines and archived in several places for posterity. In the current state, I suppose something like Wikia but for anything? It definitely deserves some place.
But the public perception of encyclopedic has changed since the marriage of data storage with computation.
A printed volume has limitations that do not exist in a database or a filesystem. A wiki encyclopedia can easily preserve all information ever added to it, and still present it through as many interfaces as it likes.
If articles are tagged with enough metadata, it would not be extraordinarily difficult to produce all of the following automatically, with no further human intervention: abridged dictionary, unabridged dictionary, single-volume encyclopedia, multi-volume encyclopedia, single-disc encyclopedia, all math and science, all history, all art, all art minus the webcomics, all meaningful human knowledge, every last bit of trivia ever recorded, and everything written by anyone named Steven or Stephen.
It could be like moderating an entire library with the Slashdot system and then setting the default browse level to +4 or +5. But instead, the moderator-tyrants delete anything that they believe to be (-1, unimportant), and they can't be effectively metamoderated by the community.
And this is the problem with putting online and adhering to C19th definitions of information optima. It's time for a new format and more adaptive information metaformat.
I agree, and I've made this point myself in the past. Notability standards do serve a purpose, but it should no longer have to do with a scarcity that doesn't exist to the same degree as with printed material.
