From: Ray
Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
JAY JG wrote:
Sean, I'm very rarely on AfD, but from what
I've seen (and what
others have said here) the AfD appears to make reasonable decisions
95-98% percent of the time - it's the last 2-5% of controversial
decisions that are causing all the angst here, combined with concern
over a "poisonous atmosphere" on the page.
The page deals with over 100 articles a day, so it's easy enough to
find examples of bad decisions. However, no system is perfect, and
the error-rate at AfD does not appear to be particularly
unreasonable for a human intensive process working under fairly
loose guidelines. It certainly has not been demonstrated that the
any other system would have a lower error rate. Furthermore, it
should be kept in mind that "hard cases make bad law". Finally, as
has been pointed out by Tony, AfD itself has a limited capacity, so
the overall "harm" it can do Wikipedia, at least in terms of
articles deleted in error (or, for that matter, kept in error), is
miniscule.
Your ratio of controversial articles seems about right. The problem
is in the tenacity with which controversial deletions are protected.
No damage would be done by allowing the controversial ones more time,
or allowing them to be easily undeleted for further discussion for as
long as it takes.
So what you're suggesting is that AfD simply needs to be modified a
little to allow longer decision periods for, say, articles in the
65-75% delete range, and that the rules for VfU need to be loosened
somewhat? These don't seem to me to be insurmountable obstacles, or
indications of a completely broken process.
By the way, my (admittedly limited) experience in this area tells me
that articles voted for deletion often take many more than 5 days to
be deleted, and that many VfU nominations consist of disgruntled
article authors complaining that "my article is the truth, you're just
censoring the truth!!!"