On 7/14/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
SJ schreef:
We've renamed VfD this once, to get rid of the 'votes', since it shouldn't be about votes. Perhaps it is time to get rid of the D, since it isn't really about deletion -- which involves an initial assumption of bad faith -- but about review: what is the author thinking? If the author is really trying to convey useful information about an encyclopedic and notable subject (good faith), how can we help them improve their work / extract better information from them / guide them to reasonable style guidelines? "Articles for Deletion" could be something related, very specific, and altogether different.
AfD really is about deletion: at least 75% (I don't know the exact percentage) of the articles brought to AfD are deleted. Naming it anything but "Votes for Deletion" misrepresents what is happening. That could lead to new contributors missing the point of the nomination, and that may lower the probability that the article is improved. (At least, that was an objection the last time this was proposed.)
You contradict yourself here -- yes, many articles brought to AfD are deleted, but you suggest that "the probability that the article is improved" is important; highlighting that AfD is not simply about "delete or keep" but about maintaining quality. And even the deleted articles should often not be deleted without any further action; catching up with the original authors, merging useful information from articles not notable enough to have their own keyword,The current formulation encourages the occasional bad faith discussion.
But we don't need to speak in the abstract. Take some of today's AfD entries, for instance: they include [[Bubbles the Clown]], [[Katie Hopkins]], [[Chess strategy]] and [[Chess tactics]] -- all of which (even the first) are well written, contributed to by many people, well to very-well referenced or linked, and in the latter two cases have been around for five years.
None of the AfD discussion about these articles had the subtlety of - considering original photos or illustrations created for them -- a PD photo of Ms. Hopkins, disgrams for the chess articles, an audio recording of the Bubbles article - considering the extent of the article's editing history and contributions - addressing discussions on their talk pages, some of which was about merging or POV; contacting WikiProjects committed to the articles that had templated their talk pages
Instead, while noone claimed that these articles did not contain useful information that was carefully put together to inform an audience, the discussions take an oppositional tone: Delete v. Keep, pushing to persuade in a sentence or two, not to find ways to make the contributions of the existing authors useful. [It occurs to me that having such debates and not transcluding them onto the article talk pages points to a deeper problem. None of the four articles mentioned had a peep of the AfD thread on their talk pages...]
A comment from the chess page AfDs: * Keep. If WP:NOT says this article should be deleted, WP:NOT is broken. JulesH 19:00, 15 July 2007 (UTC) ** It may be, but I dont think an AFD is the place to discuss changes to policy. Corpx 19:34, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
Again, a reason these discussions should, in cases that are not claerly about 'how to delete', be active reviews, providing feedback to confused editors and broken policy as needed.
It might be sensible to have a cleanly generalized "Articles for Review" page that decides what to do with articles that have trouble. Does it get pushed off to a subgroup, say via {{delete}} or {{cleanup}}? perhaps there are niceties to be followed when deleting something -- check in with the main authors, decide whether or not to delete the talk page as well, archive as appropriate, update inbound links, doublecheck that the authors aren't serially doing something they shouldn't be. This could go to an "articles for deletion" project -- at which point it is not about WHETHER to delete, but HOW.
So the decision to delete an article or not is taken entirely at the "Articles for Review" page? See above about misleading page names.
You review an article that is causing someone trouble, to consider the best way to handle it. One possibility is deletion.
if a review points to deletion, an AfD discussion might decide it should not be deleted after all -- this might be a more friendly version of DRV, carried out by people who care specifically about deletion and deletion policy, but while the article is still public for all to view its content and edit history. (NB: this could also remedy one of the troubles with DRV, pushing the abstract idea of policy/decision review to a more universal forum for [[Policy appeals]].)
And what do you mean by "HOW"? There is only one way to delete an article: the "delete" tag at the top of the page. (Proposals to merge or redirect should not be brought to AfD, at the moment; those are just part of "normal editting")
I elaborated a bit before. One of the purposes of an AfD discussion would be about whether that was in fact suitable; people at AfD presumably knowing the most about deletion policy and tips. Then the question is how to properly carry out the admin and style guidelines for deleting something.
A meticulous process would notify the major authors of an article, and WikiProjects which are following it; looks for content in the article to merge -- this is no longer a part of 'normal editing' since once the closing admin carries out a deletion, normal editors cannot see content to merge it. Such a process could also check that any important talk-page sections and the deletion/review discussions are preserved, and cleans up any images or media that are orphaned as a result.... and it could offer contributing authors a way to get an archival copy of the article and its history for their records [since in the future it would both not be available to regular editors to view old permalinks, and not be exported in database dumps].
A crude process would delete article and talk page without further consideration. And an aggressive process would delete these, and work to prevent others from archiving copies of the text or edit history.
These last options happen now on occasion with large, long-lived articles, and can be deeply offensive. As an example, consider the deletion (and removal of copies from user-space) of [[Wikipedia:Eleventy-billion pool]], something I wish had not happened.
SJ