It's about mindshare. It may or may not be physical, but it certainly is rival.

Yes -- the general public, who don't have strong feelings about the matter, will all end up on one or the other anyway. The other side, the one visited only by people who care about the difference, would become an irrelevant backwater. One side is going to win, and the other is going to lose.

both sides want to declare "regular" wikipedia their lawn though.

I don't think the inclusionists care that much - they just want the information to be out there.

The deletionists, though - yes, they do seem to care about the "right" version.

IMO.

Agreed, but it's not just a motivation problem. Deletionists get an upper-hand over inclusionists when the article is deleted because the history is not available, and you have to start all over. You can't just revert to a previous state of the article (that may not have been far from a state where it had enough references and content to avoid being questioned for notability).

Here's a particularly interesting self-referencing article that was deleted and previously discussed on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518508 And here's the deleted page--with no options to look through the history and see what it used to look like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiid

If you could continue to help edit an article that was made invisible for most users, articles would have a lot more time to prove their notability.

One interesting question is whether Wikipedia is legally even allowed to hide the history of deleted articles. It's not even available in the database dumps, which wouldn't be a realistic format for the vast majority of users anyways:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps#What.27s_not_avail...

Content is licensed under GFDL or CC-SA so you'd think they are required to make it available somewhere.

Seems like the simplest compromise is to leave wikipedia as is but change deletion into relegation to another tier.

That would be fine, but there are some 'deletionists' out there that wouldn't be happy with that.

Some deletionists aren't happy with just reverting edits; they insist on actually deleting articles completely and forcing contributors to start over. I've seen this happen and it's like they actually enjoy destroying information more than creating it.

It's one thing to obsess over the quality of an article, but there are people who obsess not only over that, but also about what's in an article's edit history, and don't hesitate to call for total deletion of an article -- about as close to a book-burning as you can get, really -- in order to wipe out something they feel isn't important or just plain don't like.

It's sad, really, because Wikipedia always struck me as having a lot of potential. I still use it to look things up, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend any time contributing, just to have my work deleted out of hand.

I think the possibility of article rehabilitation is probably the best reason to do something like I suggested. Otherwise though a relegated article in my mind should be largely like a deleted one in that the main wikipedia can't link to it - but external links will still take you to the page which would be clearly marked as not in the real wikipedia.

I agree with your point about the extreme deletionists, I think if they couldn't irrevevocably destroy the work they would be a lot less interested in pursuing it with such vigor.

Or they could just tag certain articles as "not ready" and notify the user. But in the end it's still wikipedia and it's still a volatile reference.

Have you seen Wikipedia? They already do that with tons of pastel warning boxes.