On 12/10/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
That's an abuse of AFD per the increasingly decorative policy. It's explicitly not for editorial work.
One of my long-standing beefs with the deletion process is that people use it as cleanup, and when you call them on it, they say "But doing it this way gets results under the threat of deletion, while if you list something on cleanup, nothing ever gets done."
And then people turn round and say that if anything's ever deleted through AFD, the topic is never again allowed to exist, even if the reason for deletion was that it was a crap article that needed cleanup.
([[WT:AUM]] is currently trying to form a local consensus that supersedes computer science with voting, so it must be a good idea.)
More accurately, they can see the positive effects of getting creative with templates, while the negative effects are invisible on the small scale and thus easy to ignore.
The discussion we should be having is one of "Should we extend template syntax in order to allow more clever things to be done in a sensible, maintainable way that won't impact system performance?" Ugly template hacks to do logic and programs are not really the way to go there.
-Matt