1. Noone is questioning your right to revert (or maybe even delete) 'Peter is gay'. 2. There are specific people consistently deleting articles that have real content. For example, schools. They have consitently failed to gain concensus to delete all school articles, and so are listing every school individually, counting on the fact that noone can be bothered to vote on every one. The fact that each one is often a stub at this stage makes it easier still to delete them, and allows them to make the case that there is precident for deleting more schools.
The point is that this is contentious, because not only is real information about real things (not 'Peter is gay') is being lost, and furthermore, only admins can even see what is was that was lost. Mark R.
--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I've only been skimming this thread, but I think people proposing policies upon policies are missing what actually makes wikipedia work: people just do things that need to be done. When I see a crap article that says "peter is gay", I hit 'delete', I don't list it on a page and request permission to delete it. I don't think most other people do either (or even read this list or the millions of policy pages).
It's true people should exercise discretion, but if an article that has about 8 words in it was "unfairly" deleted, it's not like Wikipedia has lost an irreplaceable masterwork. There is no prohibition against creating a new article in its place (and while you're at it, if you made it better it wouldn't even be a question). If there are specific people consistently deleting questionable things, you could leave a message on their talk page asking them about it.
Some of the arguments over "unfairly deleted" VfD articles seem to have a similar misconception that we're deleting all possible articles at that location, while we're only deleting the one that's actually there. If there's an incoherent article with no useful information at a location of a famous person or entity, it's still appropriate to delete it. Someone can later create an actual article at that location, which then wouldn't be deleted.
But the main point is that Wikipedia works by people doing what they think is reasonable, and talking to people who are doing things they disagree with, not by a bunch of policy mumbo-jumob. I've taken to not even reading policy pages anymore, because there are literally thousands of them, and most of them are incredibly long and intricate. I don't know what the hell deletion policy is anymore: there must be at least 10 pages on the subject, and 100 proposals to replace it with a new set of policies.
-Mark
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