Introducing Infinithree: Against Wikipedia Deletionism

I was ranting about this issue for long time, really like that someone is working on that.

I see the most promising line as actually being something considerably different from Wikipedia, rather than an opposition to it, which despite the top-line rhetoric does seem to be what the proposal is hinting at.

Wikipedia aims to be a summary of existing sources (books, journal articles, newspapers, etc.), with citation to where it got its material, but originating nothing; basically, the ultimate tertiary source. I think that's a useful thing to have, but it's not the only possible thing you could imagine building.

"True and useful" is a rather different set of criteria, and there is a whole space of websites that could pursue that, ranging from some that already exist (music and literary fansites, some academic wikis, knowyourmeme.com, Everything2) to many that don't yet.

As a "deletionist" (at least in theory if not in practice) I welcome this project.

I'm glad that somebody is finally doing this, instead of just sitting around complaining that wikipedia isn't what they want it to be. Complaining that wikipedia isn't an indiscriminate collection of information is like complaining that Target isn't a fine lobster restaurant -- it was never intended to be and it's fine the way it is. There's enough "inclusionists" out there that I'm sure they can build a parallel encyclopaedia with a slightly different philosophy, and if (as I suspect is true) it turns out to be swamped with useless and unverifiable information (not to mention a huge number of vanity pages) then at least we'll know.

However:

[it] will discard ‘notability’ and other ‘encyclopedic’ standards in favor of ‘true and useful’

I'm not sure how "useful" differs from "notable" and I suspect they're just going to wind up having the same arguments about different words. For instance, is a ten thousand word biography of my cat both true and useful? It's certainly true, and it might be useful to someone at some point, so why delete it?

Here's just one example. There are thousands of companies and people on Crunchbase that are not notable enough for Wikipedia. Having that information on Crunchbase is extremely useful.

Jason Scott proposes a different set-up[1], where he compares an evolution of Wikipedia to how newsgroups got set up, with different servers choosing to retain articles based on whatever rules they are run by. He, of course, envisions himself subscribing to one that would retain everything, notability be damned.

[1] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2646