The issue raised regarding backlog and tagging instead of action are quite valid, and quite to the point. But some background on the cleanup is needed. As one of the people who jumpstarted WP:CU along with Cimon Avaro, Angela, and others, I have a bit of a different view on "hopelessly broken" and the like.
Cleanup was a purpose-driven fork of VFD, which at the time was extremely overused --a differnt type of backlog. VFD's overuse violated the basic laws stating limits on Wiki page use and possibly the law of thermodynamics as well. Its the basic problem of Wikipedia using a platform which served us fine till now, but doesnt quite scale in certain areas than others. Theres some finite limit on how much high-traffic editing a particular page can handle, though that has greatly been improved with section editng, etc. This reminds me of the quote about supercomputers being 'machines for turning computation problems into I-O problems.' As WP probably has more direct human processing power ever assembled for focus on a single project, (aka a supercomputer) its always a question of handling the output data.
That requires a proper means to handle the processing (people programming) through policy and process. These need to scale up --not down, and these social processes (i.e. people protocols) need to be broader in their intelligent application, not narrowed in accord with red-button clearance models.
Summing up, there are technical limitations imposed by the nature of wiki for cross-article (and cross-wiki) applications. There are social limitations imposed by our current (flexible but non-definitive) social policy-making structure, and process limitations imposed by our current (small core) administration structure. These have always been problems and the only thing the community can ever really do is play catch-up.
Anyway, thats some generalized background. SV
--- Travis Mason-Bushman travis@gpsports-eng.com wrote:
On Sep 7, 2005, at 11:37 AM, Fastfission wrote:
I think it is worth reiterating that it is the job
of the *article
content* to establish notability, not the job of the voters. In an ideal
VfD world, one would
blame the articles for how they were voted, not
the voters.
In this case, VfD was actually a positive process
in article
improvement -- something not too uncommon, I think, and an aspect
of VfD which has
been somewhat underemphasized in the calls for deletion
reform.
In fact, I personally think this is the *only* way to call attention to such questionable articles. As I've pointed out on Talk pages, there is a backlog of something like 30-50,000 articles tagged for {{cleanup}}. Simply tagging something questionable for {{cleanup-importance}} only adds to the hidden pile. If an article may not be important enough, putting it up on AFD brings it to the attention of hundreds of Wikipedians - "Hey, look, there's this article I can't make heads or tails of and it may not be encyclopedic. What do y'all think?"
Is this is the *best* way to do that? Probably not. But as long as the {{cleanup}} process is hopelessly broken, AFD is the only effective means of getting a questionable article in the limelight.
-FCYTravis
Travis Mason-Bushman Public Relations Director GAINSCO/Blackhawk Racing travis@gpsports-eng.com
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