Sam Korn wrote:
On 11/20/05, Bryan Derksen
<bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
That looks like a different premise contributing
to our disagreement,
then, because I'd count that as "keeping" the article and therefore as
the merge vote being interpreted as "keep". A vote that wasn't
interpreted as either keep or delete would just be equivalent to a
"comment" or somesuch.
You're talking from a black and white point of view. I'm talking from
a greyscale (or perhaps even 24-bit colour) view. I say merge is
separate from keep. People who vote "merge" clearly don't mean
"keep", because otherwise *they'd have damn well said it*. So don't
appropriate votes to suit your point of view.
Yes, I know, I already explicitly said I was seeing this as a black and
white issue. And as I explained, I believe that it fundamentally _is_
black and white; at the end of the day the closing admin will either
press the "delete" link or he won't press the "delete" link. Merge
votes
push that decision in the "don't press the delete link" direction, and
so they look more like keep votes than delete votes to me. This isn't an
attempt to "appropriate" them, just pointing out what their actual
effect is. I don't see why this is such a matter of contention.
I agree that pages that need merging don't need
AfD, but sometimes AfD
gives pages that need merging. Are you really going to take the
rules-lawyer approach and say that an AfD cannot give a merge
consensus? That is what you might call "rigid officialism".
When did I ever say that? If an AfD comes along and lots of people
suggest merging the article into some other article, then it would take
a pretty strange interpretation of rules to try to forbid merging the
article after the AfD is done simply because AfD's not supposed to be
used solely to make those decisions. People also suggest things like
"clean up spelling" or "remove the bright purple tables" or whatever,
and those are often good ones too. My point is that if there's an AfD
and lots of people suggest merging the article, that shouldn't be taken
to mean that the article should be _deleted_.