[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was Howdidthis happen (comixpedia??))

[Sam Korn]

On 11/20/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> 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.

You may.  I don't.  So don't insist that that is what should be.  That
is what you think should be.  I acknowledge it if I have also been too
stringent in this.

> >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_.

Your precise words were "AfD has nothing to do with merging", which
implies exactly what I said.  In the end, we are not really discussing
whether it's a de facto keep.  We're discussing whether it's a de jure
keep.  (At least, I am.)  I don't think anyone has suggested that
merge should mean delete.  I have only ever argued that it should be
considered as "merge", completely separate from keep or delete.

--
Sam