JAY JG wrote:
Sean, I'm very rarely on AfD, but from what
I've seen (and what others
have said here) the AfD appears to make reasonable decisions 95-98%
percent of the time - it's the last 2-5% of controversial decisions
that are causing all the angst here, combined with concern over a
"poisonous atmosphere" on the page.
The page deals with over 100 articles a day, so it's easy enough to
find examples of bad decisions. However, no system is perfect, and
the error-rate at AfD does not appear to be particularly unreasonable
for a human intensive process working under fairly loose guidelines.
It certainly has not been demonstrated that the any other system would
have a lower error rate. Furthermore, it should be kept in mind that
"hard cases make bad law". Finally, as has been pointed out by Tony,
AfD itself has a limited capacity, so the overall "harm" it can do
Wikipedia, at least in terms of articles deleted in error (or, for
that matter, kept in error), is miniscule.
Your ratio of controversial articles seems about right. The problem is
in the tenacity with which controversial deletions are protected. No
damage would be done by allowing the controversial ones more time, or
allowing them to be easily undeleted for further discussion for as long
as it takes.
Ec