On 6/7/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/6/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 05/0 This is just *stupid*. This is what putting something up for deletion is *for* - saying "This article may be deleted, please look at it and give your opinion" - and there is no more effective way to do it than AFD, for all its faults. I have no idea why you believe someone needs to be personally prejudiced towards deleting the article in order to raise this question
It's a really annoying habit. There are genuinely articles that should be deleted out there. And plenty of others that aren't, but were nominated for crappy reasons. Nominating articles apparently at random, just to give AfD'ers something to think about is just creating work for everyone, with little benefit.
If you're not sure whether an article should exist, use {{nn}} or something and start a discussion on the talk page. Nominating for AfD is saying "This should be deleted, all in favour?!" Not for "What do people think?"
I think Kelly Martin, myself and a few others pointed out this problem one or two years ago. At the time Kelly was pushing for AfD to be renamed to something more focused on discussion of article quality. As I said then, AfD is basically the low-end counterpart to FA. People ignore things like peer review because there's no real action that comes out of them - how much attention does your article get if it's tagged with a notability tag? From my experience, not much - at least, that's how it's been with PR where there's even a centralised list of articles with summaries of concerns about them.
The basic problem is, people put articles on FA and AfD when they want discussion about them, because our other processes for outside input on articles don't work when there's no end objective in sight.
Johnleemk