Thank you for your long answer; I understand your ideas a bit better
now. Still some questions/remarks.
SJ schreef:
On 7/14/07, Eugene van der Pijll
<eugene(a)vanderpijll.nl> wrote:
SJ schreef:
You contradict yourself here -- yes, many articles brought to AfD are
deleted, but you suggest that "the probability that the article is
improved" is important; highlighting that AfD is not simply about
"delete or keep" but about maintaining quality.
I guess I meant something like: we should not scare away the newbies,
and so we should give them the chance to improve the article, even
though we know it probably won't happen. What I'm afraid of is something
like:
New wikipedian: Hey, where is my article?
Oldbies: We deleted it.
N: Why didn't you tell me?
O: You should have watched the article; it was clearly tagged for
Articles for Review, because it needed to be cleaned up.
N: I saw that, and I loved the idea of other people polishing up my
article, but instead you deleted it!
O: *shrug* 90% of all articles brought before AfR are deleted, so you
could have expected it...
But I think that your two-phase proposal would not get these reactions,
as long as the notices are formulated with some care.
And even the deleted
articles should often not be deleted without any further action;
That is not true. If any further action should be taken (like merging
useful content), most likely the article shouldn't be deleted; just
redirected (and that means that there was no need for the article to be
at AfD).
(I'm cutting a large part of your answer here; that is not because I
don't appreciate it; as I said, it clarified your ideas.)
[It occurs to me that
having such debates and not transcluding them onto the article talk
pages points to a deeper problem. None of the four articles
mentioned had a peep of the AfD thread on their talk pages...]
Transcluding the AfD page on the talk page... that wouldn't be a bad
idea at all...
Again, a reason these discussions should, in cases
that are not
claerly about 'how to delete', be active reviews, providing feedback
to confused editors and broken policy as needed.
(snip)
if a review points to deletion, an AfD discussion
might decide it
should not be deleted after all -- this might be a more friendly
version of DRV, carried out by people who care specifically about
deletion and deletion policy, but while the article is still public
for all to view its content and edit history.
So, and I'm paraphrasing here, your suggestion is:
* Replace AfD with a two phase process, doubling the amount of work that
needs to be done;
* increase the quality of discussion in the first phase by asking
contributors to put a whole lot more effort into constructive
criticism;
* and only allow a small part of our editors (the friendly, sensible
ones) to comment in the deletion phase.
I agree that such a system, if it were possible, would solve a lot of
problems with AfD.
A meticulous process would notify the major authors of
an article, and
WikiProjects which are following it; looks for content in the article
to merge -- this is no longer a part of 'normal editing' since once
the closing admin carries out a deletion, normal editors cannot see
content to merge it.
See above: if content should be merged, it should be visible to normal
editors (which is equivalent to: if normal editors cannot see any
content to be merged, the content should not be merged).
Eugene