From: Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net
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.
So what you're suggesting is that AfD simply needs to be modified a little to allow longer decision periods for, say, articles in the 65-75% delete range, and that the rules for VfU need to be loosened somewhat? These don't seem to me to be insurmountable obstacles, or indications of a completely broken process.
By the way, my (admittedly limited) experience in this area tells me that articles voted for deletion often take many more than 5 days to be deleted, and that many VfU nominations consist of disgruntled article authors complaining that "my article is the truth, you're just censoring the truth!!!"
Jay.