I have decided to put together some thoughts on deleting pages. Note that this is a work in progress, should be taken in the comtext of AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTD and that it doesn't override the standard deletion guidelines.
As a wiki, some pages will be made that should not exist. Removing these is a required task. Somehow, we have to decide which pages have to be deleted. Most of these decisions are easy, but some are more difficult, and I don't think that wikipedia handles these well.
First, the easy pages. They contain any or all of:
- Advertising
- Hoaxes
- Nonsense
and other assorted crap, with no hope of being made into proper articles.
Then come pages that do get in the way, like contestants in reality TV showns. In general, I think that they should be
redirected to the show itself unless they are deserving of a page for other reasons. This goes for things other than TV shows, for example an inventor who invents something that gets a page does not necessarily need a page themselves, and a redirect to the invention may be better.
From here, it starts to get difficult. The other pages to delete go because the are on topics that are not noteworthy. Some of these are easy too, like pages that are on individual users with no claim to fame or bands that don't meet WP:Music. But what about pages on other things like web pages, computer games, level crossings ... the list goes on. Currently, the general feeling seems to be "If in doubt, delete", with pages needing to justify their existence not just on factual grounds, but also on importance. It's as if there is a magic bar that is arbitrarily set by random people who choose to hang out at WP:AfD, and I don't think that this is healthy for wikipedia.
So to cut to the chase, I feel that as long as an article doesn't violate policy (eg. original research), is factually correct and doesn't get in the way, it should stay. Yes, we will get lots of articles that most people have no interest in, but we have heaps of those as it is, and besides it's not as if it's a paper encyclopedia.