On 5/3/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 03/05/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
By a horrible article I mean one with no verifiable content whatsoever. Depending whether or not the person creating the article seems to be acting in good faith I'd say it should stay around between no time at all and two weeks or so.
Ah, so you mean an article with no claim to notability, or a suspected hoax? Both candidates for speedy deletion :) If all the content is unverifiable, it could always be trimmed down without going through AfD at all.
Well, a suspected hoax would be on the "no time at all" end of the scale. A non-verifiable article submitted by a regular contributor would be on the "two weeks or so" end. A non-verifiable article submitted by a relative newbie might be somewhere in between.
As for "an article with no claim to notability", I actually have no idea what that phrase means.
And as for trimming down an article without going through AfD at all, that's only possible if there's *some* verifiable content (along with enough information to tell us how to verify it).
And IMO yes, an article which is not verifiable is worse than nothing at all. It should be corrected as soon as possible, and keeping it around in the main namespace for very long is not acceptable (still IMO, of course).
How about stubbing it and moving the content to the talk page, gently redirecting the newbie there? I'm just speculating a bit here...
Stubbing only works if there's something there you can verify in the first place. Stubbing an article without verifying that your stub is accurate first is a very bad idea IMO, because it gives false credibility to the possibly inaccurate statement.
I agree with that point to some extent (at some point you've gotta just stop feeding the trolls though). In any case, how well written an article is *does* tend to affect the outcome of votes on deletion.
Pity.
Steve