Let's start, then, with the fact that when a page is deleted, not only does the information get removed from the active site, but the history is removed in a way that only an administrator can see it, making it impossible to even judge if the information was relevant. Personally, I consider that inexcusable for a website that claims to be an open system in which everyone plays a part, and I feel undermines the argument that deletionism is a valid premise.
You know what, though? For all of the breadth of your list of horrors that would suddenly be covered on Wikipedia: I'd love to see every single one of those on the site. I want to see them represented, in fact, so strongly that I am having a difficult time convincing myself that you aren't actually just being really sarcastic about this whole issue (and then I'm being too daft to realize "oh, he's being absurdist, listing things which we actually would want, to make a point").
The concern should only be whether or not the information, if found on the site, could possibly be accurate or trusted, and the realization to have there is that a better solution to that problem is to more effectively expose the edit state of the article (a la IBM's "History Flow" visualization), as the problem of accuracy and notability is already a serious problem in individual paragraphs of articles about topics whose conclusion is non-controversial even to deletionists.
I didn't present a "list of horrors". A parade of horribles is a debate tactic where an opponent of an idea extrapolates it as far as possible and presents a set of luridly bad outcomes that will result from it. It's considered a cheap argument and given the name ("parade of horribles") because of the subtext that the horribles are actually unlikely; that anyone can take any argument, extrapolate it to an absurd extreme, and come up with a series of bad things that won't in fact happen.
Unfortunately for that rebuttal to my comment, AfDs on Wikipedia are archived:
Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/#{ YEAR }_#{ MONTH }_#{ DAY }
You will, perusing these pages at random, discover a couple things:
* There are a LOT of terrible articles submitted to Wikipedia every day
* The examples I provided upthread are representative of what Wikipedia actually deals with.
* An astounding amount of effort goes into diligently handling those articles on a case-by-case basis.
A few months ago, another "deletionism" freakout on HN happened when a famous SEO expert's friend found her article deleted, and the SEO expert wrote an angry blog post. In discussing the incident on HN, two things emerged: first, the erstwhile WP subject was not in fact notable, and second, in handling the AfD for the article, before any media attention had landed on that particular debate --- that is, while that AfD was just another routine debate --- a Wikipedia volunteer actually took the time to look up the library circulation numbers for a book the subject had ostensibly published.
I think you are claiming that I am referring to the notion of "parade of horribles" with my comment "list of horrors"; I have no formal debate training, and have never heard of that specific "cheap" tactic you are now defending not having committed. If your defense is relevant, it is sufficiently pedantic as to go over my head. :(
My "rebuttal" was actually that I liked that entire list of things, and I can only see Wikipedia being better for including information on all of those topics (along with appropriate visualization to demonstrate the inability to as easily trust the content that has had fewer editors, something you need anyway to solve the "subparagraph of article 4" problem).
Honestly, I thereby cannot see one thing in your most recent comment that actually responds to either of those contentions; again, to be highly repetitive on purpose: 1) that those things are not inherently bad, and 2) that there are better ways of solving verifiability for both articles and paragraphs (the latter of which being important).
(Also, on the off-chance this wasn't clear to anyone: the actual articles are deleted permanently. What is archived publicly is only the argument regarding the deletion, which is often just "I don't think it has enough sources", "I think it counts", "no, it didn't", as in the case with the article Jason Scott is complaining about today: without the actual text of the article or what the references even were, you cannot judge for yourself. I maintain this is inexcusable for a project with Wikipedia's charter.)
I provided WP's reasoning for keeping articles about "Fourlokotinis" and non-notable local amateur sports teams off the site. They are:
* Those articles are extremely likely to be inaccurate, because nobody outside the very small number of people with firsthand knowledge about them can verify them.
* It's manifestly obvious that those articles would quickly overwhelm the encyclopedia with obviously bullshit content; again, just look to the absolutely enormous quantity of totally ridiculous articles logged, complete with deletion debates, on the AfD link I provided.
* The articles themselves would spark huge time-wasting debates about placement and weighting, which is something that already happens with verifiable articles.
* A huge incentive exists to push vanity content onto WP because of its prominence on the Internet.
If Wikipedia were infinitely large and largely full of garbage, I would not notice. The Internet is "overwhelmed" with spam and vanity websites, and yet I don't notice. The issue is only, I will restate as you again seem to have ignored it, whether I might accidentally overly trust content I find on Wikipedia because it is on Wikipedia, and again: that is already a problem with paragraphs of larger articles, and there are better solutions that solve both at the same time (such as visualizations of edit controversy, as a particular example: IBM History Flow).
I already made these arguments: I do not see you responding to them; I, and other people on this thread, do not agree with your personal assertion regarding how the site will be "overwhelmed", so that is not an argument unless you can provide actual evidence that an infinite number mostly-pointless articles will cause Wikipedia harm. The closest you come is jut asserting that people will overly trust it, not why or whether deletionism is a better fix than my proposal.
(edit:) You also should tie the response back to the game in question: even if many of these spam articles should be culled, maybe the barrier to culling should simply be higher, in order to decrease the false positive rate. That was the argument made at the very top of this thread and, you know what?... you seemed to ignore it as well, as you only seem to care about the one issue: whether crap could exist and whether the site could get a lot of it if it had no filters at all... that isn't even controversial (and to the extent that it is, it seems to mainly be surrounding whether the specific things in your list were crap, not whether one could imagine something that was truly worthy of being deleted, even "speedily").
You know what, though? For all of the breadth of your list of horrors that would suddenly be covered on Wikipedia: I'd love to see every single one of those on the site. I want to see them represented, in fact, so strongly that I am having a difficult time convincing myself that you aren't actually just being really sarcastic about this whole issue (and then I'm being too daft to realize "oh, he's being absurdist, listing things which we actually would want, to make a point").
The concern should only be whether or not the information, if found on the site, could possibly be accurate or trusted, and the realization to have there is that a better solution to that problem is to more effectively expose the edit state of the article (a la IBM's "History Flow" visualization), as the problem of accuracy and notability is already a serious problem in individual paragraphs of articles about topics whose conclusion is non-controversial even to deletionists.