On 11/20/05, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Yes, I know, I already explicitly said I was seeing this as a black and white issue. And as I explained, I believe that it fundamentally _is_ black and white; at the end of the day the closing admin will either press the "delete" link or he won't press the "delete" link. Merge votes push that decision in the "don't press the delete link" direction, and so they look more like keep votes than delete votes to me. This isn't an attempt to "appropriate" them, just pointing out what their actual effect is. I don't see why this is such a matter of contention.
You may. I don't. So don't insist that that is what should be. That is what you think should be. I acknowledge it if I have also been too stringent in this.
I agree that pages that need merging don't need AfD, but sometimes AfD gives pages that need merging. Are you really going to take the rules-lawyer approach and say that an AfD cannot give a merge consensus? That is what you might call "rigid officialism".
When did I ever say that? If an AfD comes along and lots of people suggest merging the article into some other article, then it would take a pretty strange interpretation of rules to try to forbid merging the article after the AfD is done simply because AfD's not supposed to be used solely to make those decisions. People also suggest things like "clean up spelling" or "remove the bright purple tables" or whatever, and those are often good ones too. My point is that if there's an AfD and lots of people suggest merging the article, that shouldn't be taken to mean that the article should be _deleted_.
Your precise words were "AfD has nothing to do with merging", which implies exactly what I said. In the end, we are not really discussing whether it's a de facto keep. We're discussing whether it's a de jure keep. (At least, I am.) I don't think anyone has suggested that merge should mean delete. I have only ever argued that it should be considered as "merge", completely separate from keep or delete.
-- Sam