In Defense of Inclusionism
This is a long but excellent article - well worth reading.<p>By coincidence, I became aware of this bizarre &quot;deletionist&quot; culture at Wikipedia recently when I was searching for information about a particular musician. This is someone who has a handful of popular-ish songs on streaming sites, all from television soundtracks, but hasn&#x27;t really charted as far as I can tell - in other words, an artist I would peg at about 50&#x2F;50 odds to have had someone bother to write a Wikipedia entry for them.<p>Lo and behold, I found that someone <i>had</i> written a Wikipedia entry for them, and that it had been deleted because they weren&#x27;t deemed famous enough to have an entry! I was dumbfounded... This is someone that <i>millions of people</i> have probably heard in the background of primetime television, and information about them was <i>actively</i> deemed unworthy of Wikipedia!<p>It was a strange, depressing, and disturbing moment of realization about how Wikipedia had evolved from the early days when I was consistently delighted to find information on all manner of obscure topics, lovingly curated by people who cared deeply enough about them to invest their time in informing the world about them. Thanks to this article I now know that it wasn&#x27;t just an isolated incident.