Re Apocs comments. My experience has been that while there are
overenthusiastic speedy deletion taggers out there, most of them are
quite receptive to a bit of guidance. Unfortunately and perhaps due
to our ongoing shortage of admins there isn't enough of that feedback
being given, and poor speedy deletion tagging has derailed several
RFAs this year ("Good vandal fighter" has long ceased to be enough on
its own to get someone through an RFA, especially if there is
perceived to be a flaw elsewhere).
But as for "What do you do if their deletion tagging is no more
accurate than picking new articles at random?" I haven't encountered
new page patrollers whose tagging is anywhere near that bad. Quite a
few of the articles that I decline as speedy deletions subsequently
get deleted at AFD, as though the article claims importance the
subject is not notable. Other common mistakes that I've noticed
include tagging attack pages as biographies lacking a claim to
importance or significance, and tagging pages as no-context when a
smidgen of work can salvage them.
Defaulting to minor edits is also something that nowadays can damage
an RFA, it certainly didn't help my first one. But unlike some faults
most RFA !voters are open to a candidate who responds by changing
their default; again I doubt that enough admins or experienced editors
are taking the time to point this out to people making that mistake
before their RFA.
WereSpielChequers
Message: 10
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:02:11 +0100
From: Surreptitiousness <surreptitious.wikipedian(a)googlemail.com>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie and not-so-newbie biting
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID: <4AB75D33.8010703(a)googlemail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Apoc 2400 wrote:
A question for the admins here: When you come across an article wrongly
tagged for speedy deletinon or prod, do you check up on the user who tagged
it? What do you do if their deletion tagging is no more accurate than
picking new articles at random?
When I tackled NPP and prods I used to follow up on this, but after a
while I noticed it didn't make much difference. I also noticed such
users would pass RFA's quite easily because of all the people who would
support them based on their awesome work "fighting" vandals. I burnt out
fairly quickly I'm afraid on these tasks. I'm trying to find a new way
of shaping people's behaviour on Wikipedia such that it is better in
keeping with the spirit of WP:CIVIL. There was one user I used to nag
repeatedly to turn off the minor edit check-box to no avail, which I
found incredibly frustrating. I think after a while you develop an
instinct about people who will be good Wikipedians and those that won't,
but it is incredibly hard to try and generate debate on those issues.
User RFC's are next to useless, I mean, could you imagine an RFC on a
user who refused to mark their edits, no matter how contentious, as
anything other than minor? It's seen as something rather trivial.
The issues we discuss in this thread go deep, but
here is one change that
would help a lot:
* Articles should not be tagged for deletion two minutes after creation for
not asserting notability. Yes there is {{Hangon}} but how would a newcomer
know about that, and why should they? Of course an article created a minute
ago is being actively worked on. If it's not time critical (attack pages,
copyvios) no tagging should happen the first hour. If this is technically
difficult then NPP should be modified.
Personally I'd like to see deletion
rolled back further, such that stuff
that was neutral and verifiable and wasn't obvious spam just be kept.
Let every company that has ever existed have an entry, no matter how
brief. If it is verifiable, where's the issue. An argument can be
mounted that we are failing to adopt a neutral point of view by
excluding some businesses over others. If you have a short stub which
merely states the line of business and the date of establishment, you've
given due weight and you've gone some way to informing a curious reader,
further than a red link does.