David Goodman wrote:
" the overwhelming majority of speedily deleted
articles deserve to be
so." -- yes, so they do. But of the people who contribute them, many
can be encouraged to learn how to write adequate articles and perhaps
become regular contributors. People who write inadequate unsourced
promotional articles can be simply rejected, or alternatively helped
to write good ones or at least realize and understand why their topic
is unsuitable and respect us for our standards. If one out of ten
respond favorably to our endeavors, we'll gain 100 good contributors a
day.
What is required is the patience to deal properly with all of them,
although only a minority will respond as we would like them to.
OK, I have been
doing a lot of speedy patrol since the topic last came
up on the list. Initially I was interested to see if one became
punch-drunk by intensive sessions (not too bad, in fact). I now have
some feeling for statistics. The one that matters most to me is that
something of the order of 2% of speedy nominations are just cleanup
cases (sometimes extreme, but not nonsense as often tagged). Very
largely these are of Asian origin. I think we might all agree that the
"market for Wikipedians" in (anglophone) Asia is nothing like saturated.
The next number that occurs to me is that perhaps 5% of speedy deletion
generate queries. You can see them on my usertalk, where most are better
than the "Thanks alot jerkoff!" section. They all need an accurate
answer that is also reasonably helpful. Note that the more polite
queries tend to be from "spam"-type deletion taggings. The assumption is
that helping people who really are trying to get their company or
product a Wikipedia page is part of the job if you patrol CSD. Well, I
agree with that but it consumes time.
My own feelings are that the "presentist" bias of submissions is a
terrible skewing of the encyclopedia idea, but I quite see that this
should never enter my admin work. David's argument seems to need
shading: an editor who is only really interested in creating a company
or product article may not become a general-purpose Wikipedian. But of
course he or she may, and we just don't know. (It's the old argument
about advertising being mostly wasted money, and the argument is valid
here.)
Charles