Deletionism

With the new age of digital access media comes new ways for information to exist, allowing it to be accessed from anyone at anytime, anywhere. While services such as Wikipedia serve as platforms to allow people to share information as they choose, it has in the last decade become a battleground for two opposing forces about how the information should be shared and what is and isn’t worthy of being an article on Wikipedia.

On one side of the fence, we have the inclusionists, who are trying to include as much information as possible onto the user based encyclopaedia. This includes little stars to the most popular, articles on the most seemingly irrelevant to the most relevant.  They are the fighters for free and all inclusive information.

On the other side we have the deletionists, who are fighting for the site to be more exclusive and of higher more pertinent knowledge. They want it to more akin to published material to minimise excess and have only quality beefy articles.

With emotions running high with their strong beliefs they both have extremists views of each other where the deletionists think the inclusionists will include everything until every person and their pet in the world has a page dedicated to them. Where the inclusionists consider deletionists will delete everything down until it just has articles about God and Britney Spears.

Although I understand the fears and wants of the deletionists, I think they are fighting the wrong fight, Wikipedia is not a published based source, it’s a free user based source, it shouldn’t be censored. Because what information is important? It’s information that is needed by someone. If a person needs information on a certain small time actor, information about the Christian Church wouldn’t necessarily be important, but that small time actor will be very important.

This mentality reaches out beyond Wikipedia, let us consider ebooks. If a publisher or database site decides that a book is no longer worthy of keeping anymore they can delete from existence and stop any further people from accessing the material. This will stop the flow of information and items can slip through the cracks into obscurity or be almost like they never existed in the first place. Therefore people with access to this information can filter and censor what is seen by its viewers. All at the touch of the button...

Search Strategy:
Due to the heavy involvement of Wikipedia on this subject, I thought it was imperative that I got onto Wikipedia and see what it said about deletionism. So I searched for it on the wikipedia website, which felt like a big no-no for an academic study task but I did it regardless, and found a very neutral article on the battle between inclusionists and deletionists. I then searched for outside sources on the subject, a lot of sources I located were of blogs on either side of the fence yelling at each other over who is in the right and calling the other a moron. I think this is what you need to look at though, as it is still an ongoing battle between the two mentalities and both sides have their voices to be read. But you should approach it with an unbiased eye.

David, Peter 2010, ‘Wiki wha? Doing battle with the Deletionists’, Comic Buyer’s Guide, March, p. 82, General Onefile, Gale Cengage, viewed 28 May 2012.

Johnson, Bobby 2009, ‘Wikipedia reaches its limits’, The Hindu (English), 13 August, Academic Onefile, Gale Cengage, viewed 28 May 2012.

Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia 2012, Wikipedia, viewed 28 May 2012, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia>.

Brockmeier, Joe 2012, Is Wikipedia's "Deletionism" Out of Control?, Ocstatic, viewed 28 May 2012, <http://ostatic.com/blog/is-wikipedias-deletionism-out-of-control>.

Bray, Tim 2012, Deletionist Morons, Ongoing, viewed 28 May 2012, <http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/15/Deletionist-Morons>.