An article named [[Characters in the Animal Crossing series]], which was crufty and about characters in a Nintendo video game, got listed in June for deletion by [[User:A Man In Black]]. That user cited its game-guide nature as a reason for its deletion. The article passed the AfD with a consensus to "keep", about 7 users to 2.
Less than a month later, [[User:Aaron Brenneman]] replaced the article's contents with a redirect to [[Animal Crossing]], the article on the first game in the series. He cited on the talk page his reasons for doing this as being: "no sources, multiple clean up tags, better dealt with in parent article, unencyclopedic tone".
This redirection was left alone for almost a month, until [[User:A Link to the Past]], one of the voters in the AfD, noticed the redirection and reverted it. This led to a revert war with the original deletion nominator, A Man In Black, who seemed keen to enforce this redirection which had accomplished what his failed AfD did not.
Upon my questioning of him about it, A Man In Black seemed nonchalant about this redirection ignoring consensus reached on the AfD, saying that the article is substandard (etc) and the AfD consensus should be effectively ignored, in favour of his own personal opinion about its encyclopedic nature (or lack thereof). I encouraged him to start another AfD, but he said he did not want it to be deleted, simply redirected.
Which brings me to the main reason for this email (thank you for reading this far, all 3 of you!). Deleting an article with a strong "keep" AfD vote is clearly against consensus and therefore a violation of deletion policy. But is changing the article into a redirect to be considered effectively the same as a deletion, for these purposes?
Stories about AfDs failing (for no consensus) because votes are evenly split between "redirect" and "delete" are absurd, because all of the voters clearly do not want the article to continue to exist in its present form.
Surely the opposite can also be said of a "keep" consensus AfD: most of the voters plainly want the article to continue to exist as an article, not as a redirect and not deleted.
~Mark Ryan