Andrew Lih wrote:
I'm all for reevaluating how VfD works, but I'd like to oppose the name "Editorial Review."
Not only does it sound Nupedia-ish, but I have a strange image of a salon with leather chairs, Ivy League professors smoking cigars and sipping cognac while deciding the fate of articles from commonfolk. The name "votes for deletion" makes the barrier high, meaning an article stays unless you put yourself on the record for endorsing a destructive act.
This may come as a surprise to those who've found me a "deletionist", but I think adopting the "Editorial Review" moniker makes Wikipedia less wiki-like. It makes Wikipedia sound really stuffy and formal, which it really is NOT.
I share at least some of Andrew's concerns about the choice of name, though perhaps not so much that I would say "Votes for deletion" is necessarily better than "Editorial review". But at a minimum, we would need to do something that doesn't confuse the process with "Peer review", which we already have a page for, and which is very different from the deletion process.
I also agree with RickK, in that I think most of the problems can be addressed by improving the atmosphere, through renaming the page and/or providing better instructions on what the process is for. If this is done, I think the existing process can handle the issues just fine. For example, I definitely disagree with the suggestion that all new pages should be sent into a special editorial review process; they get that already with the wiki system and recent changes. Whatever we call it, VfD is for special cases that need something beyond that.
--Michael Snow