The problem with the unused articles is slightly subtler than "it will use up our hard disk space!" A friend of mine recently created a Wikipedia article for o

The problem with the unused articles is slightly subtler than "it will use up our hard disk space!" A friend of mine recently created a Wikipedia article for one of her own economic theories. She is not an economist, and as far as I know has never studied economics. The theory is loosely based on the work of one economist, but the sources she listed included her own blog, that economist's work, and newspaper articles--not articles about "the XYZ Theory," but articles about events she believes are relevant to her theory. But the end result was a reasonably well-written article, with plenty of linked citations (which would appear relevant to anyone not paying close attention), about a theory that does not exist. And because the article got so little traffic, she was the only one editing it. The thing is, when she linked to that article from her blog and social media profiles, and from other tangentially related Wikipedia articles, suddenly that theory seemed to have some validity that it hadn't had before. And googling "XYZ Theory," which would have gotten 0 results the day before, now got a handful of results. All of them were related to that article or her blog, of course, but someone casually searching for information might just click through to the Wiki article without noticing. The point is, articles about non-notable topics aren't just irrelevant. They're of much lower average quality than the rest of Wikipedia because they have much less traffic and many fewer potential editors knowledgable about the topic. They're more likely to have factual inaccuracies, more likely to be biased, more likely to just suck. And it'd dramatically reduce the confidence one could have in any Wikipedia article about anything one hadn't heard of before, because you might be its first viewer.