On Sun, 06 Mar 2005 13:47:37 +0800, John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com wrote:
I absolutely agree with Dpbsmith. Policy is meant to change with the community, not vice-versa. As much as some of us would like to avoid voting using highly subjective grounds like notability (which has different meanings from person to person; my idea of notability seems highly inclusionistic compared to some of the notability grounds used in voting today), the fact remains that a good deal of the community *does* use notability as a reason for deletion. If the community wants an article to go, we shouldn't disregard their opinion just because it's based on something subjective, since the resolution of the issue of contention -- should the article be deleted? -- has been agreed upon. (taken with a slight modification from [[Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy]])
The difference, my friend, between policy and convention, is that the former is transparent, is rational, and is decided by consensus, whereas the latter is transient, opaque, often irrational, and decided by majority/plurality. A good policy is applied equally to all articles that fall under its remit, whereas convention follows the whims of its constituents. I'm sure there are enough people that don't like any particular article to vote for its deletion. It's only the choice of sample that decides the outcome. And personally, I do not hold much faith and the self-selecting sample that is VfD.
I don't think removing nominations from VfD that are without a reason found in the deletion policy is a good idea. If the nomination has no specific rationale in itself, that might be acceptable, but non-notable is often used as shorthand for not encyclopedic. It's basically an editorial judgement - it's like a shorter version of "I don't think this topic is sufficiently encyclopedic enough to merit its own article in this encyclopedia". A nomination to delete should not be discarded wantonly. If it's unreasonable, the community will speak for itself, and that's much better than letting someone unilaterally make the decision that the nomination is bullshit.
It's hard to know where to begin here. How could a nomination be valid, without a rationale? This doesn't grok at all for me, and moreover, troubles me slightly. An editorial judgement it is indeed, and a consensus of 5-7 (arbitrary guess there) is not qualified, in this writer's humble opinion, to make editorial decisions for something that has nearly half a million articles and hundreds of thousands of users. Those who frequent VfD, as I mentioned earlier, as not representative of the whole Community, and it's rather audacious for any size proportially sized group to claim to be. And lastly, isn't this thread an example of the community saying it is unreasonable, and speaking for itself.
I agree something has to be done about VfD's size, though. I just don't feel this is the right solution; rather, it more feels like a disguised attempt to lead us down the slippery slope of discarding votes simply because they just said "Delete. Non-notable." Regardless of the reason given, as I stated in the first paragraph, it's still an editorial decision that does not need extensive justification: An editor feels the topic does not merit an article. That opinion is factored into the decision by the community as a whole.
I think we're agreed here. It is about geting rid of nominations where the nominator, in addition to being too lazy to improve the article to something which can be built upon, is also too lazy to show why it should be deleted. Shall we just have a voting system for all articles, as you say, it's just an editorial decision. Let's let the community decide by voting,... Also, I think we need to vote in a new lead developer </glib>
I think what should be done is to get the community more involved in VfD by reducing its size and providing more avenues for categorisation of articles being nominated for deletion. A professional aviator, for example, would be interested in VfD nominations relating to aviation but not scuba-diving. And so on. Likewise, a lot of articles are often deleted unanimously or nearly unanimously, and end up cluttering VfD, making it difficult for editors get to the heavily debated nominations. [[Wikipedia:Categorized deletion]] and [[Wikipedia:Preliminary deletion]] are both proposals that should be considered and discussed more; if people aren't satisfied with them, nothing's stopping them from making suggestions.
VfD's problem is not people making unreasonable nominations (those are already easily removed because we still have a smattering of editors being bold enough to use common sense). VfD's problem is it's too large for the community to easily vote. Solve that, and the problem of trigger-happy nominations will be easier to handle.
I don't think your idea of unreasonable nominations, as shown by this post, is quite as extensive as some people's. On the ridiculous size of VfD however, we are fully agreed. The implimentation of this proposal would in part solve that problem.