I'm assuming someone may have already said this, but content isn't locked into Wikipedia. It's Creative Commons-licensed, meaning that if someone cared about curating and maintaining this history, they could have moved those articles over to another wiki. There are even wiki hosting solutions that make these kind of moves relatively easy.
The problem is not that the Wikipedia community was curating their content, but that that batch of content was not being actively curated by someone. This is how history works. Someone has to determine something notable and worth preserving. If no one stands up for a piece of content, then it eventually dissipates into the ether.
The problem is not that the Wikipedia community was curating their content, but that that batch of content was not being actively curated by someone. This is how history works. Someone has to determine something notable and worth preserving. If no one stands up for a piece of content, then it eventually dissipates into the ether.
If that's the case, I don't see why anyone should value a resource where the content is decided by whoever wastes the most time judging which content is "worthwhile". It seems like it's a lot easier for a small group of people to go around flagging articles for deletion than it is for people to go around finding articles to defend against deletion.
So if group A decides they are just going to start deleting all articles older than X years old, whose job is it to stand up to them and why would that situation be a good thing?
Edit: And how is this similar to how other records of history are kept? Do you expect authors to have to physically defend a library from roving bands of book burners? "If they really thought the content was important, why would have stopped people from burning the books."
> Someone has to determine something notable and worth preserving. If no one stands up for a piece of content, then it eventually dissipates into the ether.
His entire point is that this process is broken and heavily biased against the person who wishes to stand up for the content. Did you have a specific reason why he's wrong about that?
My point is more that if the community has an issue with the content, then take it someplace else. There are more wikis than Wikipedia. If you imagine that all knowledge in the world is a library, then Wikipedia is only the two or three shelves of big, heavy encyclopedias. If you don't think there's a wiki for your domain, then start one.
The problem is not that the Wikipedia community was curating their content, but that that batch of content was not being actively curated by someone. This is how history works. Someone has to determine something notable and worth preserving. If no one stands up for a piece of content, then it eventually dissipates into the ether.