Delirium wrote:
[...] If some grad student puts his resume up, what
are you supposed
to do with it? Do we really need a stub saying "so and so is a
first-year graduate student at the university of idaho; he has not yet
published any papers or done any noteworthy research"? What about the
case a few months ago where someone was making up characters
supposedly from books that as far as anyone can discern don't actually
exist? Malicious or just plain useless stuff like that really needs
to go, and there's not much else you can do with it. And putting it
on VfD is better than assuming it's crap and deleting on sight,
because sometimes you turn out to be wrong and it actually wasn't
crap, so it's nice to run it by people first to make sure.
As far as stubbing things goes as well, I'm not that sure it makes
much difference either way. If the submission was about a legitimate
topic but a content-free submission, nothing's really lost by deleting
it. Sure, you can undelete and stub it, but if it was content-free
anyway, you could just as easily stub it from scratch without
undeleting. It doesn't take too much research to write two sentences
from scratch on most topics (a google search usually suffices). I'd
personally rather just delete crap, and readd it later when someone
has something contentful to write about it; there's thousands of
potential articles to be written, so there's no reason we should be
forced to write a particular one right now just because someone
submitted nonsense with its title. Just delete it, and write it later
if anyone feels like it (or write a different article instead; doesn't
matter much either way).
The main problem I see with not deleting crap is that it won't all get
fixed for a while, and then the links will be blue instead of red.
Instead of a source text, I'd much rather have a red link. The source
text adds no content (it's easy to google for), so there's no
advantage to having it on Wikipedia in the meantime until a real
article gets written, and some disadvantage.
I think part of the problem is that VfD is a lightning rod for dispute.
90% of the discussion could
have taken place on the talk page (remember talk pages? :-) ), and as
usual there's nothing to prevent
poor content from being severely modified or even deleted. Junk article
names could be redirected to
a designated page called [[Dead End]], and if nobody ever re-edits the
article into a non-redir, then a
periodic scan of "what links here" will give candidates for quiet
deletion if anyone wants to bother
then.
Much of the time the junk articles are orphans, so it's unlikely that
readers will ever see
them, and so there's really no urgency about doing something with them
*today*. Creation
rate is just a small percentage of legitimate article creation, so they
will alway be a
minority.
Stan