These quotes give insight on how deletionism looks to the external world, for whose people who think that "deleting first, ask questions later" is a way to improve our image.
New York Review of Books: "a lot of good work—verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange—is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow, almost grade-schoolish notion of what sort of curiosity an online encyclopedia will be able to satisfy in the years to come...There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking peoples' work"[1]The Economist: "The behaviour of Wikipedia's self-appointed deletionist guardians, who excise anything that does not meet their standards, justifying their actions with a blizzard of acronyms, is now known as “wiki-lawyering”.[2]
The Guardian: "And then self-promoted leaf-pile guards appeared, doubters and deprecators who would look askance at your proffered handful and shake their heads, saying that your leaves were too crumpled or too slimy or too common, throwing them to the side."[3]
The Telegraph "The rise of the deletionists is threatening the hitherto peaceful growth of the world's most popular information source. It's on the discussion pages of articles nominated for deletion that anger creeps in. Policy documents are referred to only by abbreviations...the favourite of the deletionists WP:NOTE (notability)...The notability debate has spread across the discussions like a rash."[4]
PC Pro magazine: "For an example of the dark side running out of control, though, check out Wikipedia...It seems Wikipedia has completed the journey by arriving at an online equivalent of the midnight door-knock and the book bonfire"
Los Angeles Times"...if even a small number of useful articles are being deleted in the name of keeping Wikipedia clean, isn't that like allowing a few innocent men to hang in favor of a lower crime rate?...Wikipedia's community has become so rushed, so immediatist, that it is not willing to allow embryonic articles even a tiny modicum of time to incubate"[5]
The Telegraph:"Wikipedia should delete the deletionists"[6]
"Wikipedia: A Quantiative Analysis", PHD: "the Wikipedia community needs to rein in so-called deletionists -- editors who shoot first and ask questions later."[7] [...]