Sorry to send so many replies in one email but as all are related to VfD, it seemed silly to send them separately. This is in reply to Danny, Jimbo, Erik, Optim, Rick, Ed and Theresa.

>Danny thought that "[[Palestinian views of the peace process]] was placed on Votes for deletion and deleted."

It was never deleted as two people on VfD suggested that at least some of the content was salvageable and ought to be merged elsewhere. Please see [[Talk:Palestine]].

>Jimbo wrote "I think that was obviously a mistake and is a good example of what's broken about the VfD concept."

Had it been deleted, that might have been a mistake, but as it wasn't, perhaps it's a sign that VfD is not as broken as many people seem to think. VfD brought new ideas to the problem, with people previously uninvolved suggesting potential solutions which are now documented on the talk page. This often happens at VfD with poor articles being saved as a direct result of being listed. I can't understand why people keep overlooking this huge benefit of the page and doing nothing but criticising the process.

>Erik wrote some very sensible things regarding the role of VfD in eliminating the articles which reflect [[What Wikipedia is not]] and suggested "communicating with users in cases where their pages have been listed"

Contacting the author(s) of a listed page is important, but not absolutely essential. The deletion process does not have to be final. There is [[Votes for undeletion]] should someone find out later their page was deleted without their knowledge. I think it would be nice if people were informed, but I don't think people should start ranting if it doesn't happen.

>Erik also proposed "solidifying certain policies"
 
This is an excellent suggestion and would largely eliminate the need for VfD, which at the moment is being used to debate the same policies every single week.

>Optim proposed "a new VfD system which uses Scientific Management principles".

So instead of training newbies to understand the deletion process and how our policies apply to articles to be deleted, you want to punish them for not already having this information? An article wrongly listed is not the end of the world. It won't be deleted, so no harm done, and hopefully the person who listed it and others that read the resulting comments on why such an article ought not be deleted will have learnt something.

>Rick wrote "I will no longer list anything to be deleted, and I will stop deleting any garbage that any vandals want to add to Wikipedia."

Rick, please stop saying this. I believe you are doing a great job defending Wikipedia from vandals and listing something on VfD that others think should be kept is hardly a crime.

>Ed suggested "we have too many crucial, urgent pages about articles and people...All we need is vandalism in progress and pages requiring attention."

Such a page would very quickly become hundreds of kilobytes long and unusable. You might find the "Things to watch" and "Problems in need of fixing" sections of [[Wikipedia:Utilities]] useful.

>Theresa said "let's have [[newbie tests]] so that non sysops can bring "hello! Paul is gay!" type pages to a sysop attention. And [[Pages that need to be moved to other wikis]] for wikionary quotes.

We already do. Please see [[Wikipedia:deleted test]], [[Wikipedia:Pages to be moved to Wiktionary]] and [[Meta:Transwiki]].

Angela.