Drivel Police Be Gone

Every now and then it really irks me that some around here seem to think they can be arbiters of value, and proceed to delete pages they deem to be irrelevant or of no value.

To me this is a despicable practice. What harm does the purported drivel do? Sure, Ward exhorts us to delete that which has no value, but to me it is a great big leap from 'no value to me' to 'no possible value to anyone'.

"Do you have a specific example in mind? I've always thought that since it takes one person to make a page, and two persons to delete it, it has some built-in abuse prevention. Meanwhile, RecentChanges is one of the most visited pages, so there's plenty of eyeballs that track every change."

And if we take the initial statement on this page literally, no-one could ever validly deem something of no value, so nothing would ever be deleted.

What harm does the purported drivel do?

Every mediocre page reduces the chances that we can find a quality page.

Really? How is that? By what mechanism do you find pages?

I find pages partly by following links, but partly by running a script that gives me random pages. Using this latter mechanism I find the pages with no content or just redirects very annoying so I'm pleased to see things tidied. Why don't you fix your script to filter out really short pages, if that's so annoying to you? Firstly, my script doesn't know about page sizes - they're not easy to determine from the name alone. Secondly, what size would you suggest? Good programming practice abhors magic numbers. I would rather see this wiki as a content rich information store so that every page has something of value. Rephrasing TheElementsOfStyle, LetEveryPageTell?.

If you're so upset about things being deleted, why not put them back? I do restore pages that are deleted. I find having to do that annoying. Would you really prefer to leave all the cruft? Or are you simply complaining about the exact level of severity?

See WhatYouResistPersists. Then stop resisting the DrivelPolice.

I am a RecentChangesJunkie and I often reverse malicious changes, restore deleted pages from Google's cache, move OffTopic pages to WikiPedia and suggest deletion of vacuous, test and drivel pages. I never delete a page alone, there must be a second Wikizen to delete a page. Is this good or bad behavior? --GregorRayman

ThankYou Gregor