> Deleting something certainly _can_ improve Wikipedia.
I agree with this, and I think you have to be dishonest to not accept it. I
just don't think the benefits of deletion, in cases where it is not legally
mandated, outweigh the potential for abuse. I think there's always a better
solution, though in some cases this would require changes in the mediawiki
software.
> I don't think the fatal attraction of deletion is that people enjoy
> "being a cop." I think the attracton is that VfD has about the right
> amount of traffic, social interaction, conflict, drama, winning and
> losing to be addictive. I can write whole articles without getting a
> single "attaboy," but almost everything I do in VfD gets interesting
> positive and/or negative responses.
This is probably more the deletionist perspective, though. Personally, I am
drawn to VfD more because it requires immediate attention. Writing a stub
can always wait. Improving an article on cleanup can always wait. Why put
off til tomorrow what you can put off til the day after tomorrow? But when
something's listed on VfD, there's a good chance that it is going to be
permanently erased (at least from my view) unless something is done about
it. That's why I feel so strongly about having access to deleted articles.
If I could only access the article after it were deleted, then it wouldn't
matter if it were deleted. I could archive it somewhere and worry about it
later.
> But creating a new article has an instant-gratification factor.
> How else can you explain the fact that people would rather
> create eighteen substubs than a single article with eighteen
> short sections?
Creating eighteen substubs is much much easier than creating a single
article with eighteen short sections. In order to do the former, you just
search google 18 times. In order to do the latter, you have to find
multiple sources on the same topic which contain 18 different facts
distributed among the different primary source evenly enough that you aren't
infringing the copyright of any single primary source.
And really, that's probably the single biggest reason to keep a poorly
written stub. It allows a type of [[clean room design]] which can free
information from restrictive copyrights. I'd rather see 18 people add 1
line to each of 18 articles than to see those same 18 people each add 18
lines to 1 article. With the latter, you get more fact-checking, you guess
less risk of copyright infringement, and you get a more neutral point of
view.
There are certainly arguments that we shouldn't have substubs and poorly
written articles. But even these arguments I don't think necessitate
deletion. If you've got a substub on a topic which could theoretically grow
(but might take a long time to do so), why not move it to the talk page?
Talk pages aren't included in random page, and talk pages don't reflect as
poorly on Wikipedia. But if someone comes along and decides to improve on
the article, the information will be sitting there in the talk page to help
that person along.
This is part of what I'm talking about when I say that there's always a
better solution. It doesn't make sense in every situation, such as an
article which is patent nonsense, but in that case we could always mark the
article as deleted (thus taking it out of random page, search engines, and
the database dump) but still allow people to view it if they want to check
and make sure that it really was patent nonsense.
> But these are all red herrings, as the Rambot articles, the Pokemon
> articles, most movies, the species articles, all get strong keep votes
> if they're ever put on VFD, and I can't think of a single one of these
> that has been deleted in recent times.
That's just because we haven't been pounded with them day after day. If I
listed 20 rambot articles a day (articles only edited by rambot), eventually
one of two things would happen. 1) I would be banned, or 2) some of them
would get >60% votes for deletion. My bet is on 1.
Firstly, may i speak for the great unwashed, by saying that there have
been far too many emails on this list from far too few people in the
last few days.
Secondly, I too would be interested in seeing who NSK is.
Thirdly, I would like to provide a hopefully reasonably NPOV summary
of the positions so far expressed re: WP:VfD
"Your a wanker" "No, your a wanker, and so is your dead cat"
These havent been very helpful.
Hence i prescribe (in my infinate wisdom) a short wikibreak for
everyone on this topic just to let things cool a little. Of course
everybody is free to ignore this and probably will.
Forthly, since there would appear to be some level of disatifation
with VfD i would suggest that those who are worried enough create some
kind of wikipage to discuss various alternatives and then try and
present these alternatives to the community.
paz e amor,
[[user:the_bellman]]
--
robin.shannon.id.au
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Recombo Plus License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/
Apparently not interested in discussing things, I guess.
RickK
NSK <nsk2(a)wikinerds.org> wrote:
On Saturday 23 October 2004 22:19, you wrote:
> as faulty as your logic.
giantsrick13(a)yahoo.com automatically ignored for personal attacks.
---------------------------------
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Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Rebecca wrote:
>
>>> Bullshit! Non-notability is not a valid excuse for deletion.
>>
>> According to who? What self-respecting encyclopedia gives me the right
>> to write an article on my deceased cat?
>
> That's a straw cat argument.
Speaking as someone who has recently lost a cat, may I say that's
extremely disrespectful to Ambi's unfortunate pet. Whatever the
verifiable facts about this cat (since I haven't read the article on it
yet), I am sure that the cat was not made of straw. At most, it may be
providing fertilizer for the growth of some straw in the future.
--Michael Snow
> If VfD doesn't have the consensus support of the community,
> then you should have no problem getting support to have the
> process stopped. Why don't you try?
I do have support to have it stopped. But it would likely take the support
of a majority of admins to actually stop the process.
> Anything that gets deleted off VfD has the consensus support
> of those who vote.
None, most things that get deleted off VfD have at least 60% support among
those who vote. Some have even less than this, though.
> If you don't vote, you have no right to complain. Same in VfD
> as it is in real-life elections.
My right to complain is not limited because I don't vote. I have a right to
complain about anything I want.
But to point out the ridiculousness of your argument, if the US government
ran 30 polls a day on whether or not to enact 30 random laws, anyone who
didn't vote would have no right to complain about the law.
It's stupid, we shouldn't be having 30 polls a month, let alone 30 a day.
Unlike the US government, "Wikipedia is not a democracy."
([[Wikipedia:Survey Guidelines]]) It's certainly not a direct democracy,
and the lunacy of the VfD system shows quite well just how impractical and
inefficient a direct democracy can be.
Anthony
> > If you can get a 2/3 vote on VfD for deleting an article because it has
> > the word green in it, I will not only support it, I will delete the
> > article myself.
> > -Snowspinner
> And I'll support its deletion as well.
> RickK
But will you support my listing of the articles in the first place, or will
I be banned for trolling? Somehow I suspect it's the latter.
Let's ban people who list articles on VfD which aren't deleted.
Anthony
> VfD has the consensus support of the community.
No it doesn't.
> Articles about schools listed on VfD have, for the most part, consensus
support to be deleted. QED.
They probably don't even have a majority support to be deleted. They
certainly don't have a consensus support.
Anthony
> What puzzles me the most is: If the cat had an article written about
> it in the local newspaper, would it be verifiable? If an orbituary was
> published, would it then count as verifiable? That's what troubles me
> most about using "verifiability" as a replacement for "notability".
First of all, show me a non-notable cat which had an obituary about it
written. This is a straw man, because no one is arguing that we keep
articles about cats. Present us with a real case, an actual article about a
dead cat which is NPOV, verifiable, and not original research. I already
suggested two, [[Tom Quartz]] and [[Slippers the cat]], and I think those
cats should at least be covered by a redirect or two.
Secondly, there are degrees of verifiability. If this actually became a
problem, we could always start requiring two or even more independent
respectable sources. Another thing to note is that the source of an
obituary isn't the newspaper. The obituary section is generally not
factchecked by the newspaper, so counting it as a respectable source is
questionable. In the case of people we can at least in theory crosscheck
the information against public records, so this is much less of a problem.
If the newspaper had an actual article about the dead cat, on the other
hand, I don't see the problem with including the cat in the encyclopedia.
Finally, what's the harm if we have an article about a few dead cats? I'm
not saying we should allow automated creation of them. Automated creation
of articles requires consensus support, and the question is much different.
> Wikipedia is not a knowledge base. Wikipedia _is_ an encyclopedia.
> Jimbo has said that Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia and that it must
> be free and that it must be an encyclopedia. I think he means it, too.
> Most of us--a consensus, in fact--are committed to that idea.
I'd like to emphatically second this. Wikipedia is and will always be an
encyclopedia. It may extend the concepts of traditional encyclopedias, for
instance I doubt Britannica will ever include an article on every
incorporated place in the United States, but Wikipedia is still an
encyclopedia. It is not a general base of knowledge. If you want something
other than an encyclopedia you need to do one (or both) of two things.
1) Get some support for your idea. Talk about it on meta. Get more support
for your idea there. Talk about it on foundation-l. Get more support for
your idea there. Then, ask for the creation of a separate project.
2) Just do it on your own. Start wikinerds or mcfly or wikinfo or
wikitravel or wikiteer or whatever other project you want to start.
In the case of a general base of all human knowledge, you're probably better
off with method #2. I don't think there is a whole lot of support among
Mediawikians to do this, because I think most Mediawikians see it as
overambitious. I might even agree with them.
Anthony