You haven't actually engaged my argument. My argument is that judgement calls about which articles not to host on Wikipedia are one a small number of driving forces that make the project actually work. You've responded to that by equating judgement calls about not hosting articles with a guy punching people outside a McDonalds. You'll be upvoted for that, because it's good, funny writing, but there's nothing intellectually honest about the point you've made.
I'm not sure if we're just talking past each other or what, but I feel that you're ignoring my point rather than vice-versa. Deleting an article on a computer scientist because he was written up on LWN instead of ComputorEdge does not make the article on Intel any better; it doesn't make the article on the American Revolution any better; it does not have any external impact besides pissing off the guy who wrote the article. Deleting articles does nothing but get rid of those articles. I believe that the site would survive just fine if one day the admins decided to reinstate every good-faith article that was ever deleted.
Where's a link to a debate where a computer scientist's points were deleted from WP because "ComputorEdge" (or any trade rag) trumped LWN?
That's a point you didn't make anywhere upthread, so it's disingenuous to say I'm avoiding it the way you avoided my argument, but I'm happy to stay on track. Point me to the pervasive class of mistakes WP is making by trusting some sources and not others?
I'm sympathetic to this argument, because when I was actually volunteering for WP back in 2007, I spent a lot of time beating back vanity pages that were anchored in one line mentions in trade press articles that were merely regurgitating press releases. So I'm with you about the low value of ComputorEdge. But when you say that computer scientists are systematically disadvantaged because of WP:V rules that prioritize ComputorEdge over LWN, you lose me, because I don't see that happening.
My apologies — I communicated that poorly. I had meant that as a facetious way of saying "niggling issues," rather than a specific indictment. My point was primarily that deleting a questionably notable article does not contribute significantly to the value that people get out of Wikipedia. They are largely orthogonal concerns. I don't think Wikipedia would lose one iota of value in the common person's eye if (without loss of generality) an article on a band in Wisconsin were allowed to remain. Wikipedia was not richer during the period Nemerle's article was deleted.
Incidentally, I just looked over Wikipedia's notability rules and they seem to be a bit more reasonable than they were when I used to edit things there, so props to them for making progress on that issue.
No apology necessary. So, I mostly agree with you: the value of deleting a barely-non-notable article is marginal. But as I've shown I think pretty effectively upthread, with the link to the URL pattern for AfD debates, that's not the problem that confronts Wikipedia; instead, editors on WP are dealing with a torrent of extremely non-notable articles, into which valid articles are, due most often to poor editing, occasionally getting caught up.
