On Sat, 4 Nov 2006 17:36:07 -0500, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
I can usually find one absolutely god-awful deletion a day on it that is getting inadequate consideration for reasons that have nothing to do with any useful definition of verifiability. Today's is [[Girly]], which I just went ahead and undeleted on the grounds that there was no point in sitting through a charade on DRV.
In other words, there was consensus to delete, a strong majority to endorse deletion, but you "know better". Maybe you do, but doesn't it strike you as just the *teensiest* bit arrogant?
Seems to me that when DRV endorses the process because it's valid then DRV is "broken", but when it overrides AfD supermajority it's "broken". I've been watching DRV for a while, most of them seem pretty uncontentious, I am having trouble finding the brokenness. AfD is, without doubt, problematic, but the issue there is essentially that it doesn't scale properly to encompass the sheer volume of crap articles being created. I personally feel that an article tagged for cleanup as unsourced should be deleted if not fixed within 14 days, that would remove a lot of the problems.
Again, I think this is nonsense. Most of them seem to be written by the people who want the crud *included*, which is why we have such a farcically low bar to porn "stars".
It tends to be, specifically, an uneasy and crappy consensus of the people who want to delete all of them and the people who want to include all of them, with an understandably but unfortunately low amount of input from the people who really don't care very much about porn stars. As a result every notability guideline tends to be a roughly halfway point between delete all/include all such that there is no consistency across topics.
That's compromise, not consensus. Compromise on which everyone can agree, that's consensus. And in the end, what's so wrong? We see with [[WP:SCHOOLS]] what happens when people *refuse* to compromise: pain, absurdity. PORNBIO sets the bar too low, I guess others might be too high, but I see no real informed dissent form the view that there should be some significance bar to inclusion. Debate on where the bar lies is, of course, perfectly legitimate.
What, people's refusal to find decent sources? Sure is.
That and a complete lack of understanding of what a decent source is. The latter is increasingly more prevalent than the former - citation of something to a mediocre source, particularly when nobody seriously doubts the accuracy of the information, is a far more preferable outcome than deletion of things that are sourced to completely reliable sources that fail to meet some editor's desire for a test that can be operated by a robot.
Maybe, but that's a pendulum thing. In the end the best result for the project is if people talk about stuff, rather than hurling accusations of wanting to delete "everything" or keep "everything".
The most frustrating thing for me is this: there is absolutely no shortage of places where you can find crap off "teh internets". I was attracted to Wikipedia because of the aspiration to be rather better than that; setting a higher standard than "I heard it on teh internets". Sure, people pick the low-hanging fruit, but much of the most contested stuff is well beyond low hanging and into well-rotted worm-ridden windfalls. Do we *really* need articles on every Flash cartoon and porn "star" on the planet? Or should that perhaps wait until we've taken the trouble to document those subjects which require a bit of work to find out about? Those where a Google search is not going to give an immediate and compendious answer? Every now and then we should actually take a trip to the library, to save someone else having to.
Guy (JzG)