On Mon, 15 Jan 2007 14:16:24 -0500, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
This thread was never supposed to be about that article. I brought it up as an example, because you asked for one, but my purpose was to see if there was some sort of consensus as to the meaning of CSD A7. Apparently, there really isn't. At least one person said that software categorically does not fall under A7, someone said it can, but only if the article is "blatantly non-notable", and others seemed to suggest that any article which doesn't claim to have two respectable independent published sources is a CSD under A7.
If it doesn't even claim to be sourceable? Damn right. Why would we want an article that fails to make any allusion to the existence of potential sources? Have you any idea how many unsourced single-sentence articles get created every day? Visit [[Special:Newpages]] and you will see why the complete failure to make any claim to notability is perfectly legitimate grounds for deletion. Many articles about homebrewed software are made by the programmers and their friends, we delete them under A7 or G11 or Ignore All Rules or [[WP:NFT]] or whatever seems appropriate. And if it turns out that sources *do* exist but the author could not be bothered to add them, or was working from memory so did not have them to hand, well that's no big deal, the author can have another go when he has his references to hand. Verifiability, no original research and neutral point of view are policies, we can't assess neutrality or anything else without sources.
This has all the appearance of a breaching experiment. I'm sorry if it was not, but seriously, did you think your original submission was actually a valid article? I do hope not.
This particular article wound up staying, at least for now, most likely in part because I spent the 41 minutes I spent making sure that it didn't qualify under even the harshest of interpretations of A7. But it's still not clear whether or not that was necessary.
You are kidding, right? If you, the article's creator, don't care enough to make at least a decent stab at covering the subject in a way that justifies its inclusion, why the hell should anyone else care? Frequently on deletion review we see people who put more effort into their arguments for undeletion than they ever did into the article. We had one guy absolutely demanding restoration of the history of an article which had been speedied, when said history was a sentence of, if I recall rightly, under a dozen words, and the article had been re-created with *actual content* - whole paragraphs of it. It's a titanic waste of everyone's time. Wikipedia is a wiki - crap articles get deleted, people come along and create better ones that don't. I have a hard time seeing this as a big problem. A redlink is probably *better* than an unreferenced half-sentence stub, after all, because someone who gives a shit might come along and make an actual article.
This thread is now at least three orders of magnitude bigger than your original submission. Does that not strike you as absurd?
Guy (JzG)