On Wed, 03 May 2006 22:04:50 +1000, you wrote:
For many people, nominating an article is no different from "voting" to delete.
This is true. In my case, I will nominate if there is a speedy tag/untag war going on. In these cases I will have no opinion at all. I usually remember to say so, I don't want a nom to count as a delete vote. I rarely vote on my own nominations.
I've been sporadically trying, along with several others, over the past few months to lift the quality of AfD nominations (the AfD nomination I link above, I would consider a minimum standard). An article nominated for deletion on the grounds of non-notability, for example, should include the reasons the nominator believes the article is non-notable, any steps he took to verify this (check history for number of editors, check "what links here", check Google, and so on), relevant policy if any, and so on. What it should *not* include is any bolded recommendation ("'''Delete''' NN"), insults, or the word "merge".
A worthy initiative. One problem is that there is such a torrent of spam, vanity and other nonsense that it is hard to spot the difference between these and genuine-but-bad articles on valid subjects. PROD was a good idea to try to separate out the crud, but of course the most blatant spam is often what people will wage the fiercest wars to keep. The tone of discussion on music articles has improved markedly since speedy A7 was extended to bands, most of the really vacuous garage bands never make it to AfD now. But we're never going to fix the problem with AfD without reducing the queues to manageable levels. Maybe that means separate queues per subject area.
Guy (JzG)