Nominating for AfD is saying "This should be deleted, all in favour?!" Not for "What do people think?"
I find it interesting that even when someone explicitly says "what do people think?" they're not allowed to *mean* it. Could we try assuming that not all people are card-carrying deletion obsessives, please?
[I have seen it asserted in this debate that people go around just looking for articles to delete. I do find that a rather surreal idea - what, they spend hours hitting random-page?]
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- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
"You might want to pick less silly-sounding examples, is all."
I would love for AfD deletionists to provide me with some, in between the rampant uncertainty about what the article is about, the nominating [[Rock climbing]] for deletion, and deleting text to create a short article then nominating it for deletion for being a short article and missing the text the nominator just deleted, I'm hard pressed to find the less sill-sounding examples.
I hadn't considered the sitting around and hitting random page, but now that you offer it, yes, that would explain a round of deletions a while ago by one editor who knew nothing about the topics he nominated for deletion and nominated article entirely outside of his range of topics, and articles that hadn't been recently edited. All the articles were on obscure scientific topics that had few google hits, but were pretty standard fair, and most were speedily kept.
But, yes, that is what I suspect he did, and it rather bothered me trying to think of how he came up with this funky set of deletions.
What do people think is sometimes sincerely asked, but it's not usually by the same editors who haven't researched the topic to even find out what it is. When I posted the possible hoax I followed a prior example by another editor who had searched for the topic, linked to his searches, suggested it didn't belong, and asked others' opinions.
I suspect there is not a lot of thinking going on, it's just tossed up for deletion, hoping someone else will do the thinking.
KP