Wikipedia has had deletion issues for a very long time. Note that there are also vague rules that allow admins a procedure called "Speedy Deletion". It lets them remove content w/o debate or public visibility. The deleted page, and all discussions about it just disappear (only an admin on Wikipedia can recover it).
One criteria that can be used for Speedy Deletion is:
No indication of importance (individuals, animals, organizations, web content)
It's a very subjective measure, yet it encourages over-zealous Wikipedians to expunge content.
The spam problem is very real for any user generated web site. I think it would be more ideal if Wikipedia didn't delete anything - but rather marked pages as being of low quality, or not meeting their standards, and perhaps removing those pages from their search index.
One criteria that can be used for Speedy Deletion is:
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_d...It's a very subjective measure, yet it encourages over-zealous Wikipedians to expunge content.
The spam problem is very real for any user generated web site. I think it would be more ideal if Wikipedia didn't delete anything - but rather marked pages as being of low quality, or not meeting their standards, and perhaps removing those pages from their search index.
Here's what I wrote about this problem in 2007:
http://faves.com/users/mike/dot/76699957085