Now, normally I'm an engineer-type who sneers at marketing and "image" and
branding, and believes that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
But I do have to wonder whether a VfD by some other name might have less
sting.
In practice as I know it today, Wikipedia is not quite as radical a departure
from traditional publishing practice was outsiders sometimes think. In
particular, there is still a process by which articles are "accepted" or
"rejected." The big difference is that everything takes place in the open and
happens in the order ready-fire-aim.
Normally an article would go first to a closed group of editors who would
accept or reject it, and nobody sees it until it gets accepted.
In Wikipedia, an article gets published first. In almost every case, an
article gets glanced at very promptly within a very short period of time
after it appears. Contributors don't realize it, but if it survives twenty-
four hours without a notice having been placed on it, it has already been
"accepted."
Borderline articles get subjected to a process. The process is called "Votes
for Deletion." To someone unfamiliar with Wikiprocess, this sounds like
"someone want to delete my article" or "someone is trying to delete my
article" or "someone hates me" or "someone hates Dartmouth."
Normally, the nomination language reinforces this question, because, unlike
the sometimes-phony practice of softening a statement by phrasing it as a
question,
phrasing it as a question, VfD nominators traditionally harden a question by
phrasing it as a statement. E.g. (GROSSLY caricaturing an actual VfD debate
for purposes of illustration) instead of saying "I've never heard of Lehman
Brothers, what do you know about them?" a nominator is more likely to say
something like "Vanity, some non-notable insurance company, delete spam."
Typically there will be a more comments like that until someone with _some_
topic familiarity runs across the VfD entry. THEN someone chimes in "The firm
is really quite large, unless I'm very much mistaken." Then there are follow-
ups "It's a Fortune 500 company," "Definite keep," "Keep article on major
financial force of the twentieth century," "Need more articles like this,"
etc.
A newbie who joins the discussion at an early stage does not understand that
his article is not in imminent threat, that there will be a full week for
people who have knowledge of the topic to notice and join in, that the curt
dismissiveness tone is shorthand, etc.
To Wikipedians, "Votes for Deletion" means "even though several hundred
people can delete articles, we take deletion so seriously that we hash over
everything for a week."
It really does seem to me that there might be ways to make the process more
intelligible to newcomers. I honestly believe that the current process
_induces_ bad behavior from new contributors who might not naturally show it.
I'm thinking something like this:
a) Change the name of Votes for Deletion to something like Editorial Review.
b) Every article when submitted automatically gets a tag at the top, saying
something like "New article, not yet reviewed."
c) Like any other edit, anybody can remove this tag, but, by custom, it is
removed by someone knowledgeable who has made a judgement that it does not
need to go to Editorial Review.
d) If the article looks like VfD-worthy material, the tag gets replaced with
a tag saying, you know, "This page has been listed on Wikipedia:Editorial
Review and may not be accepted. Please see its entry on that page for
justifications and discussion. If you want the page accepted, please read the
acceptance guidelines and vote for its acceptance there. Please do not remove
this notice or blank this page while the question is being considered.
However, you are welcome to make improvements to it."
Yeah, I know, flipping it around from "deletion" to "acceptance" makes me
gag, too.
There is a disconnect. Many newcomers do not and never will read all the
scattered policy documents (and it is in the Wikinature that they always will
be scattered and not perfectly clear or consistent). Many newcomers have the
misperception that everything is allowed in Wikipedia unless it's outright
false. Warnings about "ruthless editing" don't really convey the way it
works.
Everybody understands the concept of submitting an article for review and
possibly having it be rejected. If newcomers perceive Wikiprocess as a
variation of that model, fewer of them will be unnecessarily shocked or
offended by the VfD process.
Maybe.