Henry Bigg 1986

Please do not remove speedy deletion tags from articles. If you do not believe the article deserves to be deleted, then please place {{hangon}} on the page and make your case on the article's talk page. Administrators will look at your reasoning before deciding what to do with the article. Thank you. ➨ ЯEDVERS 12:16, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Discussion process

Welcome, Henry Bigg 1986! I noticed that you joined the discussion on Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2006 July 12. Participation in the community is encouraged, of course, but your status as a brand new user means that your opinions might not be counted. Please understand that this is a common practice on Wikipedia, and that it is necessary to prevent deliberate misuse of our discussion pages. Our discussion processes value consensus over raw numbers and reasoned debate over simple voting. However, please do make further contributions to Wikipedia and express your opinion on policy matters.

➨ ЯEDVERS 12:21, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

I stumbed upon this when revieing an article that that a link to this. Henry Bigg 1986 12:24, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

AfD

Do not delete or otherwise modify others' contributions to the Article for Deletion page. It is considered vandalism. -- Consumed Crustacean | Talk | 12:31, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Offense

Hi Henry!

Yes, it is possible that the user would be offended at having their article tagged for deletion and then deleted. But it's worth bearing in mind a couple of points.

1. This is an encyclopedia. It's not MySpace or Geocities. Entries need to be notable and encyclopedic. If they're not, then Wikipedia ceases to be a useful sum of the knowledge of the universe and becomes a playground.
2. Wikipedia is a not-for-profit encyclopedia funded by charitable donations. People posting biographies of themselves, their companies, their pets, their teachers, their neighbours etc, are using space paid for by charity money. Now, we have lots of space, but the money wasn't given to us to be MySpace. The money was given to us to be a free encyclopedia.
3. We provide a user page where people can put anything (within reason). So my biography is on my user page. That's where it should be. I don't have an article - why should I?
4. We get literally hundreds of new articles about non-notable people every single day. We have a whole category for that is usually brimming with them. We have hundreds of editors looking for them and dozens of admins who have time to do little else but delete them. Let them all in, and within a week Wikipedia would easily have well over 3000 articles about people who even their neighbours have never heard of. Within a couple of months, Wikipedia would be more than 50% a MySpace-clone. Within a year, Wikipedia would be gone.

That's why we speedy delete non-notable people who don't assert notability. If they do assert notablity, they don't get speedy deleted, they go through other, slower methods. But these methods would break under the weight of thousands of non-notable articles being put through them (they barely creak along as it is now).

We might hurt a few feelings, yes. But the consequence of not hurting the feelings of a few very sensitive, very vain souls is ultimately the end of Wikipedia. ➨ ЯEDVERS 12:36, 12 July 2006 (UTC)