On May 2, 2006, at 3:48 PM, Peter Ansell wrote:
We're not hunting down newbies and forcing them to participate in deletion discussions. Deletion discussions take place within the Wikipedia community, and like any community we have our jargon.
If someone wants to join that community, they have to learn the jargon. Even the most welcoming communities work this way.
Not everyone thinks of Wikipedia as a "Hacker-type" community.
Yeah, me neither. But we got the word "cruft" from the hacker community, so we might as well use it. "Cruft" is a word in the Wikipedia community lexicon as well.
I feel that it should be relevant to anyone. AfD is no exception to this. Especially as this is where newbies get their first taste of wikipedia bureaucracy. We should be especially careful not to bite the newbies in this or any other encounter they may have.
Not using the word "cruft" isn't going to fix our newbie-biting problems. Using the word "cruft" isn't really going to hurt things, either. What would help is if we told newbies, "Okay, the article you contributed isn't quite what we're looking for. We think it's a bit extraneous, and it tends to build up. We call it "cruft", and generally we tend to delete it. If you're looking for a place you can help, however..."
Again, what connotations does "cruft" carry other than something being low-quality or otherwise worthy of deletion?
If the meaning of the word cruft is simply used by people on AfD, whether nominators or others, because they lack respect for newbies, then it possibly has become a euphemism for something entirely different.
Again, I see no indication that this is even the case.