On 10/28/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
By entering into a respectful dialogue.
Right.. Like leaving a message on their talk page... Which is what was done in this case.
In the majority of cases where a new user has dropped a new article on our lap they don't hang around long enough to answer such notes.
If the user who discovered the suspect article doesn't place some sort of tag on it at the time he finds it, then there will be nothing to cause the article to get cleaned up later unless he logs it in some sort of personal todo system, and nothing to stop a half dozen other users from wasting their time on it while it's still on the first few pages of special:newpages. This point takes me back to my initial comment on workflow automation.
You might argue that the note that was left could have been more helpful, but because of our limited workflow automation we needed to put some kind of deletion notice on the article... and it wouldn't be respectful at all to ping the author with questions but fail to mention that the page was tagged for eventual deletion.