<story><title>In Defense of Inclusionism (2011)</title><url>http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chris_wot</author><text>I am the Ta bu shi da yu who was noted in this article, and I am indeed the person who created the [citation needed] tag. I don&amp;#x27;t think the issue is deletionism, it&amp;#x27;s instead one of a total lack of respect for other editors.&lt;p&gt;Regrettably, I probably inadvertently helped with this culture as I &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; started the Administrators&amp;#x27; notice board. Never have I seen such a cesspool of controversy, beaurocracy, wiki-lawyering and frankly power hungry people. I suffer from bouts of depression, so have left and returned a few times (actually I was made admin three times), but the last time (and believe me, the &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; last time) I tried to contribute I noticed the complete and utter lack of civility in the place. In a naive attempt to address this I tried to propose a policy where civility would be encouraged and incivility would be discouraged.&lt;p&gt;One of the key opponents, a user called Giano, went on the attack and I left the site - especially after I was told via email from Brad Fitzpatrick that I was unwelcome on Wikipedia.&lt;p&gt;I thought to myself: &amp;quot;I spent 2 years researching and writing about the USA PATRIOT Act for this?!?&amp;quot; [1]&lt;p&gt;And I left and never came back.&lt;p&gt;But, hey, if you want to see the discouragement that an average user sees - checkout my old user page. Even though it is a user page that very clearly says I have &amp;quot;retired&amp;quot; (more like sacked) there is wall to wall templates telling me I have committed a copyright violation (like hell!), or that images or articles will be deleted, etc. [2]&lt;p&gt;Further to this: deletionism is a massive problem. If you don&amp;#x27;t believe me, look at the GNAA article - there were 17 different attempts to delete it! [3] Of course, Jimbo Wales supported the deletion for fairly spurious reasons in 2006. [4] I await the day that my article Exploding Whales is deleted.&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Patriot_Act&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that I did this because of the following article:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_10_14.shtml#1098119066&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;volokh.com&amp;#x2F;archives&amp;#x2F;archive_2004_10_14.shtml#10981190...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;2. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tbsdy_lives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;User:Tbsdy_lives&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;3. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_America&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Gay_Nigger_Association_of_Amer...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;4. &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-November/057193.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lists.wikimedia.org&amp;#x2F;pipermail&amp;#x2F;wikien-l&amp;#x2F;2006-November...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>In Defense of Inclusionism (2011)</title><url>http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>codeflo</author><text>Among the people dedicated enough to become moderators in any online community, there seems to be a large subset that is very rule-focused, exclusionist and in general difficult to reason with. It&amp;#x27;s not just Wikipedia, basically the same thing  happened at StackOverflow, where all the interesting questions have been deleted, and also in several smaller online communities I used to participate in. Given enough time, those people invariably take over and destroy the community.&lt;p&gt;Reddit sort of avoids this because it&amp;#x27;s so easy to create new subreddits that people can vote with their feet if a moderator is behaving unreasonably. Maybe a similar solution could work for Wikipedia, having sub-Wikipedias with different rules. But that would require the current powers to admit that there&amp;#x27;s a problem, which is unlikely to happen.</text></comment>