Stevertigo wrote:
Try "Cleaning up" articles instead of automatically "Delete" ing them.
In general I'm fairly convinced. I previously hadn't been familiar with Cleanup (it was a little bit baffling the one time I stumbled across it). In the future if I come across a text dump of a treaty or something similar, I'll either replace with a stub, or if I don't have the time or inclination list on Cleanup so it doesn't get overlooked.
The main remaining problem for VfD then is things that don't belong in Wikipedia at all. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if there's a non-antagonistic way to resolve that, since the very idea of what belongs in Wikipedia is a contentious issue, with a wide range of opinions on just how inclusive we should be. To pick just one example currently on there, some people find [[List of localities in Britain where rare ant species had previously been recorded but are no longer considered to be present]] to be a useful encyclopedia article, while others consider the very existence of an article with such a title as bordering on the ludicrous. It's not really an issue of cleaning up, because the people who object to its inclusion are objecting to its very existence, not to its current state.
Oddly I think [[List of...]] discussions are probably a good 80% of the contentious issues on VfD these days, so *something* needs to be done about that. What, I'm not sure. The other 20% seem to be mostly "is this famous or just self-aggrandizing" (cf. [[Daniel C. Boyer]], random webcomics, etc.), but I think we can manage to handle those if we got rid of all the List discussions.
-Mark