Mark Gallagher wrote:
Perhaps we're talking at cross-purposes through differing interpretations of exactly what is meant by "keeping" an article or "deleting" it? It seems like a very black-and-white situation to me.
With "vote" interpretation, obviously if one "merge vote" was the difference between keeping and deleting, it'd be a no consensus keep (er, I hope). That doesn't mean that "merge" is being interpreted as "keep", it just means that there's no consensus to delete outright.
That looks like a different premise contributing to our disagreement, then, because I'd count that as "keeping" the article and therefore as the merge vote being interpreted as "keep". A vote that wasn't interpreted as either keep or delete would just be equivalent to a "comment" or somesuch.
(swapping the order of your comments here, since I wanted to respond to the more fundamental one first)
Worl, ideally, if an admin closes '''merge''', she'd either a) do the merge herself, or b) tag both articles for merging
Perhaps that's too much effort, I dunno. I'm not an admin. I know I haven't done very many merges off my own bat, too.
Ideally, sure, but I wouldn't necessarily consider this to be an official part of "closing" the AfD. Merging articles is in the same class of actions as fixing spellings or reorganizing paragraphs within a page, a general editing task that doesn't require the sort of rigid officialism that deletion has wound up needing. I've done plenty of merges on my own when I stumble across pages that I think need it, and ideally pages that needed merging would never be listed on AfD in the first place since that's explicitly mentioned in the deletion guidelines as something that doesn't warrant AfD.