More Words, Deeper Hole

If there's that much total crap (which I have to say is very contrary to my experience in random browsing), why aren't the editors working on eliminating that crap, rather than arguing about whether (for example) James Nicoll is sufficiently notable to deserve an article? I totally agree that spam and such really should be removed.

I say again, over half of the articles I find on Wikipedia that provide useful information I'm actively searching for are marked as under consideration for deletion. This is very discouraging! It looks very much like the editors are trying to take away most of what makes Wikipedia valuable to me!

And 30 seconds with the back of an envelope tells me that the server capacity issue is specious. Disk is cheap, and people type slowly. The "We Can't" article is content-free, it simply cites the world population and asserts Wikipedia can't cover everything; it never actually addresses server capacity. I have sitting at my left elbow enough disk space for a 50-word article on every single person currently alive on earth. It cost me less than 500 dollars, over a year ago.

The question, of course, isn't whether you have the resources to cover everything; the question is whether the resources you do have should be used removing good articles because somebody doesn't think the subject is important enough. *That's* the waste of resources, especially if, as you say, Wikipedia is overrun with articles that are blatant spam and other complete wastes of space.

I just went through 20 random articles and found nothing I'd call spam; three things that wouldn't get into the Encyclopedia Britannica (a small band with multiple records out, a small Japanese radio station, and "Laughercize"). And that last one has the "no cites" tag but in fact cites a magazine article and a CBC documentary, with links to online forms of both. No discussion on the talk page about that yet.