The battle between the "inclusionists" and the "deletionists" rages on.
Inclusionists believe that the disparity between Pokémon and Solidarity biographies would disappear by itself, if only Wikipedia loosened its relatively tight editorial control and allowed anyone to add articles about almost anything. They argue that since Wikipedia exists online, it should not have the space constraints of a physical encyclopedia imposed upon it artificially. (“Wikipedia is not paper”, runs one slogan of the inclusionists.)
Surely there is no harm, they argue, in including articles about characters from television programmes who only appear in a single episode, say? After all, since most people access Wikipedia pages via search, the inclusion of articles on niche topics will not inconvenience them. People will not be more inclined to create entries about Polish union leaders if the number of Pokémon entries is reduced from 500 to 200. The ideal Wikipedia of the inclusionists would feature as many articles on as many subjects as its contributors were able to produce, as long as they were of interest to more than just a few users.
Deletionists believe that Wikipedia will be more successful if it maintains a certain relevance and quality threshold for its entries. So their ideal Wikipedia might contain biographies of the five most important leaders of Solidarity, say, and the five most important Pokémon characters, but any more than that would dilute Wikipedia's quality and compromise the brand. The presence of so many articles on trivial subjects, they argue, makes it less likely that Wikipedia will be taken seriously, so articles dealing with trivial subjects should be deleted.
In my opinion (and, to be fair, I'm a trivial sort of guy), if people want to post about it, it should be there. The biggest barrier to "legitimacy" for Wikipedia is not that it has articles about Pokemon critters, but that some people will never grant such status to anything that is not generated by "professionals."
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