zetawoof wrote:
On 7/15/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Is it technically feasible to have a bot that records the time of the most recent edit of an article, and shows that time on the AfD page? Every new edit would then reset the clock before the article could be deleted.
It may be worth considering that there are two general classes of articles which we often delete:
- Subjects which might be worth writing about, but not the way the
current article does so. A recent example I remember was the article [[Rendering water]]. (The article explained that rendering CGI water was "difficult", but said very little beyond that.) Allowing cleanup during AfD for these articles would often be helpful.
- Subjects which should not have articles written about them, period.
Many lists fall under this category (such as one that's currently up for AfD: [[List of movies broadcast by Nickelodeon]]), as well as a number of high-profile articles like [[Brian Peppers]]. No amount of cleanup will make such an article necessary or appropriate.
At this stage I'm more interested in the technical feasibility without getting into any of the criteria that are either used or misused for deleting articles. Articles that continue to be edited within the deletion period are at least alive. The high-profile articles of the type you mention don't have this problem, but they remain a very tiny proportion of all articles.
Ec