On Thu, 8 Nov 2007 9:38:51 +0000, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Well, this is a live issue. What is the correct level of due diligence for a deleting admin? If it is a funny foreign-sounding name (to native English speakers), or written in bad English, do you do more or less before deleting? Do you think first what the encyclopedia needs, or do you cite policy and say "just following orders"?
It varies. If the funny foreign-sounding word is the name of a company or product, and the article is packed full of peacock terms, and the creator has no contributions to anything else, then I might very well delete without feeling any guilt whatsoever.
Here's a problem, though: there is a tendency to assume bad faith on the part of deleting admins, and not to address bad speedy tagging by RC patrollers. I completely support any initiative to educate those who patrol recent changes, to persuade them to make better use of {{prod}} and {{afd}} rather than {{db}}.
I also completely support the idea of renaming AFD to "articles for discussion" - which in practice it is, since merge is a common outcome but is not deletion. "Cleanup in 7 days or nuke" would seem to me to be a reasonable approach to badly sourced articles.
Still, let's not forget that there are two separate issues here which manifest in a way that makes them very difficult to separate. There is the clueless newbie, keen to document a Great New Thing they found; and there is the die-hard spammer, keen to document the Great New Thing they are selling.
Any extended period at [[Special:Newpages]] will rapidly lead to the latter becoming the default assumption, because it happens so much more often. Or at least that's my experience.
Perhaps what is missing is a triage stage between RC patrol identifying a likely problematic article, and the deletion category. Clearing CAT:CSD of a backlog of hundreds is fundamentally incompatible with being truly diligent about anything.
Guy (JzG)