Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikify, why don't you?, was Re: How to bring back people who don't want to bother?

Yes, of course you can. You're trying to tidy up the encyclopedia and you come upon a worse-than-useless article which doesn't fall under the CSD criteria. You have three options: 1. Research the topic and write a proper article, even if it's just a stub. 2. Drag the article, perhaps kicking and screaming, to AfD. 3. Do nothing. It's not surprising that the third option is a popular one and that we have a large backlog of absolute crap. It's not a very serious problem because a lot of the crap has very low visibility to anyone not engaged in Wikipedia cleanup. But it's disheartening to those of us engaged in such cleanup. "Why isn't the first option taken more often?", you might ask. Well, writing a proper stub can be surprisingly hard work even if you manage to verify that the topic is reasonably worthy. And many of us have our favorite topics which we like writing articles about and do cleanup as an activity where we want to do more manual work and less brain work. I'm not crying doom and gloom here, I'm just trying to justify why the quality of an article - not just its subject matter - legitimately affects whether it is deleted. An excellent article on a marginal topic is kept. A useless article on a marginal topic is deleted. A marginal article on a marginal topic may or may not be deleted. This is as it should be. Then there is the rare case where a useless article on a marginal topic brought to AfD is vastly improved and then kept. This is what is happening with this article I mentioned: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_cards_and_a_top_hat But exceptional cases like that don't mean we should not take useless articles on marginal topics to AfD. Which in turn doesn't mean that I'm endorsing continually picking fights about something like webcomics. Regards, Haukur