On 11/20/05, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
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.
You're talking from a black and white point of view. I'm talking from a greyscale (or perhaps even 24-bit colour) view. I say merge is separate from keep. People who vote "merge" clearly don't mean "keep", because otherwise *they'd have damn well said it*. So don't appropriate votes to suit your point of view.
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.
On the contrary, I think it is entirely the closing admin's duty to put the merge and mergefrom tages on the pages. It is only slightly longer than doing a standard delete or keep, and clearly benefits the encyclopaedia as a whole.
I agree that pages that need merging don't need AfD, but sometimes AfD gives pages that need merging. Are you really going to take the rules-lawyer approach and say that an AfD cannot give a merge consensus? That is what you might call "rigid officialism".
-- Sam