Delete the junk!
- This is actually an essay I wrote (under my old pseudonymous account) back in 2008. It's located at Wikipedia:Delete the junk, and this is the version as modified by various editors over the years. It shows its 2008 roots in its rather aggressively-sarcastic tone, and the specific way voters are portrayed – which is more relevant to how people acted here in 2008 than today, I hope – and the references to <ref> tags, which were just coming in at the time, and did, certainly help.
Sometimes, an article comes up for AfD (“Article for Deletion”), which, though its subject may be notable, has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Perhaps its only source is a promotional, questionable website. Perhaps its material seems to be completely made up from thin air. In such cases, just delete it. Wikipedia lacks articles on a lot of things, and, if the people who found 87 blog and chatpage sources using the University of Google really cared about the subject, they'd find reliable sources to remake the article.
In the end, Wikipedia can only maintain articles at sufficient quality if there are people interested in improving them according to Wikipedia policy. Where large walled gardens exist, it may be necessary to cut them down to a few, manageable articles, so that they can be brought up to sufficient quality. This means going through the huge swaths of bad articles and picking out the worst and least notable for deletion. Likewise, fixing a very bad article on a small aspect of a larger subject may waste resources better spent fixing the articles on the larger subject.
On Wikipedia, we are all unpaid volunteers. Very often, "keep" votes on these sort of articles will be combined with an insistence that... other people rewrite the article from scratch, whereas the person saying this has no intention of editing the article at all. If you're insisting other people do work creating an article on your behalf, and claiming you have the right to do this, you need to rethink your position: If you are not willing to take responsibility for improving the articles you gaily vote to keep, then you are making the jobs of the people genuinely trying to improve Wikipedia by upmerging content, reducing walled gardens to a manageable number of articles, and trying to use limited resources effectively much, much harder.