On 03/08/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
I sincerely believe the current VFD process and culture is so poisonous to Wikipedia that, at least for the moment, we would be better just letting the disks fill with band vanity, original research and poo jokes.
I agree (but the disks would never fill - see m:Wiki is not paper).
Ed deleted VfD then someone else undeleted it. Hardly a big deal. In the process he hit everyone right between the eyes with the fact that VfD isn't great.
Moving forwards though, there only appears to be only two schools of thought:
1. Those who wish VfD to stay as-is with all discussions about listings held in one place.
2. Those who think everything to do with an article should be discussed on that article's talk page (and a list of pages under discussion could be maintained with ease using a m:DynamicPageList, which we all kinds of places on Wikinews).
The former allows very much the same people to contribute to each VfD vote, with some 'interesting' concepts (eg. "notability", seemingly never defined). This could, I feel, be the root of the problems David and Ed are highlighting presently, the same ones that many have done so before.
The second would make it harder for the same groups of people to contribute to each VfD vote. It could quite possibly reduce it to only the contributors to the article and those who have in interest in the topic (picking up the discussion via the DPL).
VfD itself could easily be deleted again and no. 2 put in its place within minutes of the devs turning the DPL extension on on Wikipedia.
Should we though?
Dan