Wikipedia is definitely the most useful reference material ever created by people. It is the first and only encyclopedia to have truly global contributions, and I believe it is one of the greatest inventions in history.
That being said, there are people who want to trim it down because they want it to focus on things that they deem to be important. This starts looking silly on the surface and just looks sillier and sillier as we go down. I have a few ideas to refine Wikipedia policies to make it more robust and a stronger encyclopedia.
First of all, let’s talk about problems with the current deletionist policy:
“Notable topics have attracted attention over a sufficiently significant period of time“
This policy basically says that people shouldn’t be connected to a single event but multiple events. For example:
These individuals should have their Wikipedia pages removed according to this official policy because they are only notable for single events in history. A sufficiently significant period of time is clearly a very poor indicator of if a person is notable. This policy is so misguided that even Wikipedia doesn’t follow its own deletionist guidelines because these 5 pages exist.
The basic requirement of independent third-party sources is a requirement for every sentence of the encyclopedia and needs to be kept.
Many of the notability guidelines directly conflict with the “sufficient period of time” rule. The sufficient period of time rule should be discarded.
Almost any guideline for deletion is going to have exceptions, so here is an idea for a proposal that will allow people like Lee Harvey Oswald to have Wikipedia pages but prevent people from using Wikipedia pages to create their own personal biographies without any notes.
- If an article is not an orphan, it cannot be deleted unless 10 independent active users with over 100 edits agree.
- If over 10 independent registered users have edited a Wikipedia page, it cannot be deleted.
- If an article has had an edit in the previous year, it cannot be deleted.
- If an article has a link from at least 20 other pages, it cannot be deleted. If all of its links were created by one user, this policy doesn’t apply, and it should be deleted immediately.
So, if you have a random article about a person with no significant impact on history, no one has edited it in over a year and is linked to by any other page, go ahead and delete it. But if the page has links from other pages, and it is regularly edited by multiple users, keep it in the encyclopedia.
This retention policy is fair and flexible and will work across any topic.
Wikipedia naming policy
Wikipedia should have a clear policy for how to name articles.
For example, if we were to only use the proper name as the title of articles, the following articles should be renamed:
- The Commonwealth of Canada
- The United States of America
- The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
- Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. (and most biographical articles should be named this way)
- Dihydrogen monoxide
Sounds a bit silly, right? So a more reasonable naming policy should be to use the name which is already most commonly used in existing writing about a topic. Use only the first and last names of politicians generally, except when publications use their middle names. For basically any article pending a renaming, people considering a renaming should PROVE that another term is the more commonly used compared to what is currently used among scholarly or newspaper articles.
That being said, if an article is found to use names that are inherently biased to make the user doubt the existence of a topic (such as if one were to rename climate change “Global Warming Hoax”) even when an event is proven to exist in the article of the text, such a renaming should not occur. Moving articles to be labeled a “conspiracy theory” or a “hoax” should only be done when there is no sufficient proof an event actually occurred. If scholarly articles which refer to the topic do not refer to it as a conspiracy theory, neither should Wikipedia. The only things which should be labeled as a conspiracy theory should be things like the flat earth conspiracy, vaccine-autism connection conspiracy theory, and other ideas which are spread by people who wear tin foil hats.
On this, I agree with Wikipedia’s official naming policy full-heartedly and believe it should continue to be enforced by admins.