On 10/17/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
AFD may have had a concensus when it was deleted, but editors (even the ones voting on AFD) are fallible and if like with the professor case, they are not fully aware of certain facts they can make bad decisions. Just because procedure was followed, it shouldn't be automatically assumed, the concensus was correct.
If additional info comes to light on a subject, undeletion should be considered.
Look, it's quite simple really. You look at an article that was deleted and if you immediately slap your forehead and go "what on earth were they *on*" then it's a keeper. If half the people on VFU are slapping their forehead, then the undeletion policy says we undelete. It has nothing whatever to do with process, it's just a matter of deciding, as the undeletion policy puts it, whether Wikipedia would be a better encyclopedia with or without the article.
What's happened instead is that some people on VFU have decided to go to extreme lengths to avoid making this decision. They've gotten themselves into all kinds of contortions owing to a misplaced reverence for the "consensus" embodied in the half dozen feckless dreamers who voted to delete the article in the first place.
In short, they're scared of making decisions on content, so they've tried to reconstitute VFU as some kind of half-assed appeals court, almost completely process driven. I've seen editors on VFU seriously say stuff like "lovely article, I would have voted keep myself, but the AfD process was valid so there are no grounds to delete."
Needless to say, such thinking is indicative of a need for a boot to be applied to the coccyx of the thinker in short order. What's the point of an undeletion forum that won't undelete?