Welcome to my page. I have been involved in "virtual communities" in one form or another for over two decades. Wikipedia is one of several virtual communities that interests me a great deal, and I'm happy to be both an observer and participant in it. My actual name is Jon Radoff. There's a wikipedia article about me that I do not edit (Jon Radoff) or you can reach me on LinkedIn[1] if you need to. Unfortunately, messages left for me here on Wikipedia are almost certainly going to get missed for a long time.
The Original Barnstar
I, Beefnut, hereby award you a Barnstar for your intelligent and tireless editing of MMORPG. (1-15-2006)
I believe that growing and expanding Wikipedia is more important than destroying the work of others. I think that people who are prepared to delete or remove articles should invest as much effort in reaching that decision as those who would choose to defend the keeping of an article. The reason is that it is far, far easier to cast an off-the-cuff deletion vote (citing any number of WikiPolicies) than it is to look for the reasons an article should stay.
Wikipedia isn't paper; the vast majority of articles can be improved over time. In fact, that's how Wikipedia grew to be what it is.
But doesn't including too much mean we undermine quality?
Wikipedia has a number of mechanisms (Featured Articles, Good articles, importance-grading) for identifying those articles the community thinks are best. As for the rest: as long as an article can be supported with reliable sources (WP:RS) it should be given the opportunity to grow and improve.
Many administrators and editors will point to AfD is not a vote, which I agree with; if it were, it would be vulnerable to herding in the fanboys to make virtually any subject stick to Wikipedia. However, I feel there is a counterbalance to this argument, which is that AfD is not an administrative hearing. The latter is not an official policy stance, but I do believe it is truth and should perhaps be inducted into standard policy statements. What I mean by AfD is not an administrative hearing is that the AfD discussions cannot and must not be treated merely as an opportunity for community members to present evidence to an administrator who then makes their own independent decisions regardless of consensus. I feel strongly that Wikipedia has been built by consensus, and that any trend counter to this would become self-destructive.
I favor common sense and a liberal acceptance of sources over narrow, legalistic interpretations of Wikipedia policy. The only real hard-and-fast rules surround WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:V which deal with neutral point-of-view, no original research and verifiability, respectively; remember to WP:IAR and allow for liberal use of common sense. For example, many AfD commenters will state that "blogs are not a reliable source." While this is the case for 99% of blogs, the blog format itself is not sufficient to deem a source as unreliable--a number of blogs contain useful, well-documented and well-respected research, often with readership numbering in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions. Surely these sources are at least (if not more reliable than) a number of the printed publications with lower readership and dubious motivations that are regularly cited as reliable sources?
If you have comments on this subject, please feel free to post your thoughts on my talk page: User_talk:Tarinth.
