On 5/8/06, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
I point out that we don't need voting for AfD, which is why we changed it away from VfD, and that the proper way to close an AfD is to look at the arguments and how they adhere to Wikipedia policy...
And here we come to the key problem with the entire model: there _isn't_ an objective policy to deal with these things. (Certainly there are some policies, like verifiability, that can be used; but the lack of consensus for a more comprehensive "notability" policy is the issue.) Once you strip away all the arguments about "notability" and the sea of guidelines and pseudo-guidelines and random acronyms, you get something like:
* Delete, subject is not appropriate for an encyclopedia. * Keep, subject _is_ appropriate for an encyclopedia.
which is about as subjective a standard as you can get. We can certainly appoint someone to judge the relative arguments and decree an outcome, but the question is fundamentally one of differing perceptions of what Wikipedia should strive to be, not one of simply applying existing policy.
Kirill Lokshin