Immediatism

Immediatism is a wiki tendency which focuses on a high immediate value at any given time. An immediatist may argue that any detracting quality (such as inaccurate content or poor writing) should be remedied as soon as possible, as it may mislead readers (see WP:NOW). This is in contrast to eventualism, which accepts a certain degree of chaos in building towards a high eventual value.

Immediatism may be characterised by exclusionism or deletionism, whereby pages judged insignificant or unimportant should be deleted in order to maintain the professionalism or quality of the project as a whole. However, immediatism is not wholly incompatible with inclusionism either; there may simply be a view that the page should appear to be complete and formatted properly at any point in time, even if one must delay the addition of content.

A page's immediate value perhaps becomes more important as projects gain higher traffic, thus increasing the number of visitors seeing temporary detracting qualities. Immediatist ideas may be carried on further, possibly including controls to ensure that the immediate value is maintained. Some derivative ideas include limiting anonymous editing and prohibiting anonymous edits in the mainspace.

Despite the lack of a deadline, the justification for immediatism is simple: Good edits inform the public and clarify policy, leading to good editors and therefore good articles. Bad edits misinform the public and confuse policy, leading to bad editors and therefore bad articles.

• w:Wikipedia:The deadline is now
• w:Wikipedia:An unfinished house is a real problem
• w:Wikipedia:Beef up that first revision

• Conflicting Wikipedia philosophies