RANT WARNING
For a long time now I have been becoming increasingly discouraged and sickened by the growing tendency of certain editors to remove or delete information added in good faith and sometimes with considerable effort, apparently for no other reason than that they are unfamiliar with the information and/or do not consider it of sufficient value to merit inclusion in Wikipedia. Depressingly often the only rationale for removing information is a perfunctory reference to Wikipedia "policies" (guidelines really) on trivia, notability, or original research (and occasionally more creative excuses, but those are the most destructive ones in my experience). It is very easy to raid articles looking for anything that is of no interest to you and is not quite ironclad enough not to fall foul of one conveniently broad interpretation or other of WP:TRIVIA, WP:NOTE, or WP:ORIG, and perfunctorily delete them, either all at once or (much more insidiously and getting depressingly common) gradually stripping them down to nearly useless stubs. I originally found Wikipedia useful and came to love it because as a research resource it differed from printed encyclopedias in the wide range and especially wide connectivity of the information it contained (and I hope and pray will continue to contain). Given that it has become more and more common for me to have to find the truly useful information in Wikipedia in the edit history rather than in the articles themselves (!), I am finding it harder and harder not to think of this perfunctory deletionism as sheer vandalism. (If you feel this is too strongly worded, consider how sickeningly easy it would be for me to call various subjects of no interest to me mathcruft, biocruft, and so on, and start raiding them and stripping them down). So at the risk of breaking my spine, let me bend over backwards one more time and refer to this excellent essay in which GlassCobra puts it much better than I doubt I could ever do. If you have ever felt the urge to delete anything other than obvious copyright violations or utterly blatant vandalism (the sort of thing that involves racial or sexist slurs or George Carlin's favorite vocabulary), I strongly urge you to read it.
Back after a long absence, but I stand by my rant ;)
