User:Herostratus/7 Virtues (WP:7VIRTUES)

The Seven Virtues of an article are:  It is a decent article, or can be made so. Reasonably well written, formatted, etc. It's not such a mess that we'd be better off deleting it and starting over. And it is of reasonable length, at least a paragraph or so, if not more. It's not just a stub. And the sources for creating this decent article are OK. They're sufficiently reliable to our standards for the material referenced, and are not so obscure (local small-town paper and like that) as to be unusable. And it doesn't violate WP:NPOV or WP:BLP, at least in a way that is not easily fixable. And is likely that some non-zero number of people will want to read it, both now and in the future. And it not incontrovertibly trivia or ephemera (where Tom Hanks had dinner yesterday, what the weather was in Chicago last week, a pedestrian run over at 5th and main, etc.) And it exists. It's not a question of "should we allocate resources to creating this article". Somebody already has.If an article has all of the Seven Virtues, then the assumption is that the article should exist. This has been practice here forever, and before that since the days of Nupedia. Because our basic job here is to provide information, rather than not providing information, and in particular not destroying information that we've already made the effort to gather. Don't let anybody tell you different or cite this rule or that rule (there are a lot of rules here) to misguide you. Eyes on the prize. A good question to ask before trying to destroy an article is "If we delete this article, this will enhance the experience of readers searching on that term because ___________." If you can't think of anything good to put in the blank, maybe go do something else. Bit, if we are going to destroy perfectly fine articles just because we can and enjoy doing so, then we should at least leave a message to people who wanted to read the article, rather than just sending them to a "404 not found" type error message (along with a rather snide suggestion to write the friggin article themselves ("You may create the page "[NAME]"...)), or redirecting them someplace that doesn't have the information they seek, or anyway a lot less of it. Something like this:  The rest is noise. Here's some of the noise: