JAY JG wrote:
From: Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net
JAY JG wrote:
Sean, I'm very rarely on AfD, but from what I've seen (and what others have said here) the AfD appears to make reasonable decisions 95-98% percent of the time - it's the last 2-5% of controversial decisions that are causing all the angst here, combined with concern over a "poisonous atmosphere" on the page.
The page deals with over 100 articles a day, so it's easy enough to find examples of bad decisions. However, no system is perfect, and the error-rate at AfD does not appear to be particularly unreasonable for a human intensive process working under fairly loose guidelines. It certainly has not been demonstrated that the any other system would have a lower error rate. Furthermore, it should be kept in mind that "hard cases make bad law". Finally, as has been pointed out by Tony, AfD itself has a limited capacity, so the overall "harm" it can do Wikipedia, at least in terms of articles deleted in error (or, for that matter, kept in error), is miniscule.
Your ratio of controversial articles seems about right. The problem is in the tenacity with which controversial deletions are protected. No damage would be done by allowing the controversial ones more time, or allowing them to be easily undeleted for further discussion for as long as it takes.
So what you're suggesting is that AfD simply needs to be modified a little to allow longer decision periods for, say, articles in the 65-75% delete range, and that the rules for VfU need to be loosened somewhat? These don't seem to me to be insurmountable obstacles, or indications of a completely broken process.
By the way, my (admittedly limited) experience in this area tells me that articles voted for deletion often take many more than 5 days to be deleted, and that many VfU nominations consist of disgruntled article authors complaining that "my article is the truth, you're just censoring the truth!!!"
More or less. But it's not even a percentage issue. Many of the deleted articles may have 5 votes to delete and no comments to keep. The original contributor may not even know that the process has been applied until long after the article has been deleted. Measuring the discussion period in days alone doesn't help in obscure subjects that get very little traffic. At the same time it's easy to get five people together with a common agenda of cleaning out what they see as non-notable articles.
The average contributor cannot undelete anything. He still needs the agreement of one sysop to revive the article. It is still conceivable that a sysop who wants an article undeleted could act alone. Even the disgruntled author whom you describe needs one kick at the cat. He will still need the assistance of a sysop. To delete the article again would require some adequate number of NEW voices to want it deleted. The process could be repeated indefinitely with the key requirement being that each such action requires new participants, whether as ordinary users or sysops.
This all assumes that in course of this cycle of deletions and undeletions there have been no major improvements to the article, or there have been no acceptable alternative solutions.
There will always be articles that need deletion. Scrapping the process entirely will mean that another one will have to be found. I view the change from VfD to AfD as something of the sort. I would scrap VfU as a redundant process. If someone wants an article undeleted it should be enough to let those views be known by adding comments to the existing AfD page, which would never be closed. Starting a separate VfU discussion just means that we end up with a fragmented discussion with the same arguments in two different places.
The biggest flaw in the existing process is perhaps the tone of finality that accompanies these deletions. It is understandable that when you sweep the dirt ou the door you want it to stay out. On the other hand, stories abound of old comic books or baseball cards that were thrown out in one of mom's clean ups but which were retrospectively determined to have great value. I think that we can still have any article that goes through AfD could easily be undeleted, but I suspect that 95% of these will in fact stay deleted without any fuss at all.
Ec