Jimmy Wales wrote (regarding VfD):
The process actually works reasonably well now, so it would be wrong of me to try to decree some huge change to the process. This is a process that has grown up 'organically' over time. All we need *right now* is just the tiniest bit of formulation of what the final decision rule should be.
Are you sure? I think it's true that VfD works well in the clear-cut cases. Probably 80% of the cases are clear-cut, in that there is a clear consensus in favor of deleting or retaining the article.
For the other 20% it works poorly. These are cases where we end up discussion what Wikipedia is, or how the article space should be organized. Most of these conversations end up deadlocked, and the outcome is that the articles are kept. The many "List of," "Slogan," and "biography" discussions are examples of this. The quality of the decision making was low, and the number of Wikipedians made upset in the process was high.
A good deletion process should meet three goals: it should produce high-quality decisions, it should require minimal effort, and it should stress out Wikipedians as little as possible.
As such, while I'm sympathetic to the notion of excluding votes from mysterious users who have only edited 1 time, I think that unless it's a huge huge problem, we can safely ignore it.
It is only going to get worse, and if we actually have _votes_ rather than a consensus system, we will have to address the matter of who is entitled to vote. The project has greater public prominence than it once did, making such questions more relevant than they once were.
Louis