On 01/09/04 at 11:58 AM, "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com said: > Viajero,
List me as "abstaining" from the VfD vote: so it wasn't unanimous, there was at least one abstention. If I thought VfD was a helpful process, I'd have voted "keep".
I agree that the article wasn't well written, but I don't think /voting to eliminate it/ is the answer. Perhaps BLANKING the content and starting fresh, with a stub would be better.
Ed,
In THEORY I agree with what you say.
In PRACTICE however I have problems with your ideas.
First, that article was listed for a week or so. Neither you nor any other of the half dozen or so people who have said on this list today that the article shouldn't have been deleted took the trouble to try to salvage it. Neither did I. I simply didn't have the time or energy for it. Previous to that, it lay in the gizzard of WP for a good three, four months untouched.
It is fine in principal to be against deleting articles but that implies ACTION in concrete terms, but since we are a collection of volunteers, this doesn't always follow. While I have nothing against incomplete articles, of which there are obviously many in WP, I am strongly against have genuinely *bad* articles -- such as the Palestinian viewpoints article -- in the encyclopedia. They should be fixed immediately or deleted -- one or the other.
Not having a mechanism for deleting "bad" articles places the onus on the WP community to fix them. Any crank can come along and write up some nutty POV and leave it for the rest of us to deal with. Maybe for 99% of the articles in WP that is acceptable; for the remaining 1% on controversial subjects such as the Middle East, it isn't.
To repeat what I said above: I could have devoted an afternoon or an evening to salvage the article; so could have you, or Danny, or Zero or another user. But no one volunteered. At the risk of offending the author, it was better that it was deleted.
Pragmatically yours,
V.