That debate ended around 2006-7, the deletionists won, the inclusionists left, and then the deletionists, true to their name, deleted everything they could. After that fiasco, they took over the ArbCom, and booted out anyone who was writing anything.
The deletionist debate was then replaced by the "loose citation" "strict citation" split. This was whether claims needed to be individually cited sentence by sentence or whether you can write an original text so long as the claims are reasonably accurate when examined in light of all the sources together, evaluated critically as a whole. The strict citationists won that debate, so you can't write anything useful anymore.
This is most harmful when there are ab-initio arguments which can be followed by anyone versed in the field, but which are not found verbatim in sources. This is a common situation in mathematics and physics, where new proofs have no source, but are clearly and obviously uncontestable, as they are equivalent to existing stuff that is well accepted. The strict citationists now can prevent new articles from getting written, but thankfully they are too stupid to read mathematical sources to even verify whether the claim and the source agree, so you can snow them easily and get them out of your hair for a while, at least if you fill up a page with equations.
The politics on that site is abominable, you can't do anything useful anymore. Anything you write gets a stream of "citation required" tags and then it gets deleted, no matter how supportable. Providing citations doesn't help with politically resisted stuff, or even with just surprising sounding but well accepted stuff, because the talk pages are not allowed to debate the topic, just the claims of sources about the topic, and the decision is ultimately entirely political, based on numbers for and against. Because of this, the people there have evolved a power structure which has absolutely no regard for accuracy.
ArbCom is supposed to resolve these disputes, but ArbCom does not feel competent to judge technical accuracy. So they judge politically, they suspend those in the minority, without reviewing the literature at all. This creates a Soviet-style nightmare, and I recommend Wikipedia editing for any young socialist so that they understand the issues fully.
This means you have to wait for a project where the organizers DO accept the responsibility to judge accuracy, and do so in as objective a manner as they can. The articles at Wikipedia on controversial topics or politically sensitive topics are a scandal. If you examine "black war", you will see a great example--- the page has a nonsense pseudohistorical Australian narrative due to Windschuttle, which is neither mainstream nor correct, and it is easily contestable with sourced primary and secondary material, and any attempt to correct this is gang-reverted to the nonsense that is there now.
A tad late, but ARBCOM was NEVER designed to resolve these types of disputes.
Not handling content disputes is literally written into the first 2 paragraphs of their remit.
The notion that Wikipedians adopt one or the other philosophy is inaccurate and misleading. In the words of a veteran Wikipedian known as Aboutmovies:
Being a Deletionist or Inclusionist is inappropriate. In my opinion being either is a violation of the neutral point of view and an assumption of bad faith. Each editor that thinks about deleting another article… needs to enter either with an open heart and an open mind, and then apply the relevant Wikipedia guidelines/policies to the individual articles. Otherwise your bias can get in the way of making a sound decision based on the current policies.
This perspective is familiar to me, and I believe most Wikipedians operate this way. Some people have both tendencies: for instance, you might describe my views as "deletionist" with regard to articles about specific episodes of TV series, but "inclusionist" toward articles about legislative sessions. But I would never describe myself as one or the other in general.
This is complete nonsense, from the point of view of 2007 any Wikipedian around today is the worst kind of deletionist, it only looks normal in the environment of those who stayed behind. All the inclusionists left long ago.
You prefer that I should answer from the perspective of somebody living in the past? I can't. I live in the present. Wikipedia's present policies and processes indicate deletion in some cases, inclusion in others. The stuff you get into, I'll leave to the historians to sort out. (But I'll note that I was tremendously active in 2007; and along with most of my community, I was only vaguely aware of the alleged raging controversy around deletion.)
The controversy was that there were DIPSHITS who deleted half the articles that existed in 2007! They also kicked out those who wrote these articles, and gave each other barnstars for doing so. You just didn't notice. This made it that the encyclopedia stopped dead in it's tracks, and all the people who actually wrote useful articles are gone, permanently.
It is not living in the past, it is ignoring your bullshit already hopelessly antiquated project and looking to the future, where a better project will entirely replace it, because it is like the Soviet Union, it is broken beyond repair, and needs to be scrapped.
Yep. Dead in its tracks. Let's go talk about something interesting like MySpace, eh?
The growth rate halted in 2007, and there has been no good content added since, and most of the articles, like "cold fusion" are retarded propaganda, and it's already clear to everyone that the process is busted and became busted after about 5 years, just like the Soviet Union, for identical reasons. Bad politics.
The other projects are things like citizendium, stackexchange, quora. Citizendium suffers from topic censorship, inabiity to fork Wikipedia, and overly conservative ideas about expertise, so it is broken too. Stackexchange is going through the same political catastrophe as Wikipedia. For some reason, Quora is immune, probably due to intervention in favor of free speech directly from the top, something Jimmy Wales never had the balls to do.
Once voting systems are sorted out, they will replace authoritative sourcing, and you will get an encyclopedia edited by voting and debate on content, rather than debate on sources and political numbers. That's what Wikipedia II looks like, and it's not here yet, but your project is dead as Dillinger.
I, for one, will gladly welcome our new robot overlords! In the meantime, you'll find me on Wikipedia.
(Oh -- since you mention Quora -- "for some reason" = careful study of past systems and planning)
Ok, your prerogative. You're wasting your time.
So are you. (Wasting mine.)
OK OK, I jest -- this has been enjoyable. Signing off for now though.