On Nov 8, 2007 11:44 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Here's a problem, though: there is a tendency to
assume bad faith on
the part of deleting admins, and not to address bad speedy tagging
by RC patrollers. I completely support any initiative to educate
those who patrol recent changes, to persuade them to make better use
of {{prod}} and {{afd}} rather than {{db}}.
Whoa. The admins are hand-picked. Anyone who can get online can come and
start
adding templates. Admins are picked just because they can be trusted
with "delete" and other tools. The correct decisions for an admin with a
suspect speedy range over "pass" or "not a speedy, I'll take off the
tag".
They do not include "if I don't delete within 30 seconds, no one ever will,
so here goes".
Very true. The buck stops with the deleting admin, every time. Sure,
we should try and educate non-admins on what does and does not qualify
for speedy deletion, but it's an unattainable goal. If we could
achieve it, we could do away with admins and give the tools to
everyone. As it stands, we know we can't trust all non-admins to know
what they're doing, so we only allow admins to delete.
Absolutely. Few things piss me off more than admins who delete on sight
without even Googling the article title or looking in the history. We stand
to lose nothing by waiting a few minutes to delete, and who knows - we may
even discover the article is worth having, or a way to improve the article
as it stands.
Having said that, we should also be putting effort into educating users
about CSD, and perhaps consider revising them (though knowing the inertia of
WP policy, this is practically impossible). The CSD as they stand are often
interpreted in ways that encourage systemic bias, or otherwise encourage
false positives for deletion. An obscure religious group? Why, it's an
article about a "group of people" which does not assert notability, even if
the article is one of the better-written and -formatted articles on
[[Special:Newpages]].
But having said that, if the problem is primarily systemic bias, perhaps
focusing on things like CSD avoids the larger problem of systemic bias - how
do we change people's thinking? It's easy to say "The procedure for
reviewing speedy tags should be X, Y and Z" but not change people's actual
thinking when it comes to things they're not familiar with - and the end
result is not only wrongly deleted articles, but wrongly merged articles,
wrongly redirected articles, wrongly rejected FAs/GAs (the latter in
particular), etc. These all harm the encyclopaedia, and they are all
symptoms of the underlying problem of people's tendency to mistrust the
unfamiliar. We need to think about how to change that mindset.
Johnleemk