I wrote this in the middle of another discussion but I thought it deserved its own thread.
For the inclusionists (who I take to be those people who think bandwidth and server space are infinite, especially if they're not paying for it), I would say this:
Fine wine is a distillation of grape minus the crap. If you dilute it, there comes a point where it is no longer classified as wine. Take it further still, and it is not classified as anything but water.
Encyclopedias are not and never have been about "the sum of all knowledge". They are a distillation of knowledge. Knowledge where more and more trivia is added to, stops being an encyclopedia. Take it further still, and it no longer qualifies as knowledge. It is all trivia.
I read Britannica as a child, and I can certainly testify that the point of Britannica was to get me to check facts and read books that underpin Britannica.
I have read a large number of articles on Wikipedia (probably 40-50,000 articles) on a wide range of subjects. Most of the time Wikipedia forces me to question Wikipedia's presentation of facts and how much a subject has been screwed with by ignoramuses.
Occasionally there are great articles, but I feel sorry for the poor bastards who created such great articles whose work can be shat upon literally by anyone with an Internet connection at any time day or night. You know what? After reading Wikipedia, I don't feel like checking sources, because if they're as badly written as the text, I don't want to waste my precious lifespan on it.
Most Wikipedian articles are badly written, syntactic minefields of poor reasoning which can only derive from the multitudes of people for whom English may be their only language but its not the one they're comfortable expressing themselves in.
Tenses are usually the first sign that articles have been written by two or more people. Subjects having no object and objects without subjects are usually the second sign. A taste for sensationalism over comprehensiveness pervades Wikipedia, as well as something I call "fashionable nonsense" - the idea that if a proposition is held to be true by some academics or other self-important people and hyped by celebrities then it must be true regardless of the evidence.
So in conclusion, and to shorten the post to a nice point: Fuck inclusionism. Inclusionism to Wikipedia is what causes most of the problems.
Just imagine if people didn't have the right to create new articles unless the article subject was first passed by a responsible editorial board - Wikipedia would be a lot smaller and the articles would be a whole lot better because with a limited supply of articles, the premium would be on quality and completeness. Imagine if the Wikimedia Foundation stopped all creates unless 95% of current articles passed stringent quality checks - so its either get the article right or if that can't be done, AFD the crap with gusto. The same with BLPs - can't write a biography? Then don't write one at all.