I did an interview yesterday and got a taste of the effects of AFD on Wikipedia's relations with the outside world. The guy's a podcaster of minor notability - http://bicyclemark.org/ . (Though he has listeners, so is doing better for notability than a lot of podcasters.)
The thorny bit was talking about WP:AFD and its ... little ways. He sprung on me in the interview that he had created an article on himself, it was deleted as "vanity", several of his readers recreated it, it was deleted all those times too, and apparently some of the deletion discussion comments were more than a little spiky. I think I talked my way past that one OK ("this user is a native speaker of Bullshit"), but it was a tricky moment. I explained that if he got referenceable notice from third parties, that may show that he was notable enough to probably rate an article; that next month he might become vastly popular and clearly rate an article; and emphasised that the edge cases are always the painful ones.
(He says the podcast should be up tonight or Saturday morning.)
This is a minor podcaster, not broadcast media. But the point remains that this sort of thing causes real problems. Many think we shouldn't care about media image, but those dealing with our sometimes shaky relations with the outside world are understandably sensitive to potential PR disasters of this sort. It would be almost no effort at all to go through AFD and find a hundred diffs "proving" that Wikipedians are rude bastards, for example. (I'm sure someone can suggest it to Mr Orlowski at the Register.)
So please, when discussing things on AFD ... FOR FUCK SAKE, COOL IT IN YOUR COMMENTS AND TREATMENT OF OUTSIDERS. AND PEER-PRESSURE OTHERS TO DO SO. Thanks.
- d.