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What is the motivation for Wikipedians to take it on as their duty to scour Wikipedia for articles to delete?[edit]
With the amount of human knowledge that exists, I would expect that the primary reason someone would want to contribute to Wikipedia would be to add information to existing articles, or create new articles. Interestingly enough there appears to be a significant number of editors who instead prefer to remove information and/or delete articles. I'm not talking about removing spam, vandalism, bigotry, etc. I'm talking about deleting articles (often without first tagging them, or proposing them for review) because the articles were not "good enough", or perhaps not considered notable enough (in their opinion). Is there some magic threshold of articles that we are trying to stay under? Have we decided that the easiest way to improve the ratio of Good articles is to simply delete the ones that don't measure up? This seems like a poor policy to me, and I find it demotivating as a Wikipedian, and as well as a past contributor. Why should I invest my time into making contributions (time and/or financial) to Wikipedia when editors are seemingly encouraged to delete the hard work of others, or suggest that they relocate the content to some other wiki? --Thoric (talk) 20:24, 17 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
