On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 7:56 PM, David Goodman <dggenwp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I've worked very often at CSD, but I have just now
been taking a look
at AfC, in response to the messages about the backlog. It surprised me
initially to see that articles I would certainly have passed at speedy
were being declined there, & I was going to post a complaint about it.
But then I though it over again:
I think the effectual standard being used by some of the reviewers at
AfC is not whether it will pass speedy, but whether it would be likely
to pass AfD. Though seeing this surprised me at first, i can see
reason for it . Passing speedy does not mean it is an acceptable
article. About 500 articles that pass speedy are deleted every week,
either by Prod or AfD. Speedy is for articles that can be
unambiguously deleted, and some classes of things that may well be
utterly non-notable -- such as products and computer programs and
books -- are excluded from the speedy process because of the
difficulty in passing a rapid unambiguous judgment. Why should we
accept an article at AfC on a self-published book without any reviews
to be found? If the rules were to accept it, I would need after
accepting it to send it immediately to AfD & it would surely be
deleted. The criterion at speedy A7 is the deliberately very low bar
of indicating some good faith importance, which is much less than
notability. Asserting someone has played on a college baseball team is
enough to pass speedy--a person might reasonably thing an encyclopedia
like WP should cover such athletes. But we don't, and unless there is
exceptional non-local sourcing, the article will inevitably be
deleted. Why should we accept it at AfC?
In such cases, we serve the user better to direct them to more
fruitful topics. Perhaps the effective standard should be , having a
plausible chance at AfD. I agree that some people at AfC are wrongly
rejecting on the apparent basis of it never having potential for being
a GA.
Similarly, if the grammar or referencing style is so weak that if I
accepted it, I would feel an obligation to rewrite it, why should I
not try to get the original contributor to improve this? We can't
delete articles even at AfD on such grounds, but should we encourage
people to write them ?
I firmly agree with that assessment, but there is something else at
play here too. When someone submits an article for creation, and it is
approved, they should have at least some amount of confidence that it
survives for some period of time. It would be utter madness to on the
one hand say to new contributers "that's good enough, we're tossing it
into mainspace" and on the other see a different editor propose it for
deletion two days later. If you really want to confuse the hell out of
your newcomers, that seems the way to go. If not, then you need to set
standards a little higher. I for one am not willing to tell a new
editor "it's good enough to be submitted, see you at AfD in two days".