Guy writes:
We are all inclusionists, otherwise we would not be here in the first place. The difference is just where we place the bar for inclusion...
I like this :-) It should go right below a quote about how "the art of writing an encyclopedia is deciding what to leave out"
On 7/15/07, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
Even speaking as someone who always got annoyed as hell at people who put an AFD tag on something and then openly admit they have no desire to see it deleted (usually they just want what they think will be a permanently binding "to merge or not to merge") I still kinda sorta agree with what you're saying about de-emphasizing the possible outcome of deletion.
We have "good article review" and "featured article review". Maybe the next step is to shut down the AFD process and replace it with some sort of "shitty article review" with the expectation that people actually familiarize themselves with the article content, and try also to familiarize themselves (as best they can) with the subject before commenting.
An added "learning curve" if you will could reduce the amount of derogatory drive-by "NN, delete" voters. For each article, rather than asking people whether they think something is "deletable", we should focus on less destructive options such as merging, removing unsourced material, finding new sources, adding new material, picking up the slack and actually trying to succeed where the original writer failed.
Yes. Based on topic alone, one should be able to figure out which few articles are suitable for sending directly to an AfD discussion; if the topic could potentially have a good encyclopedic article, or a section or sentence in one, it should not go to AfD. If the topic might in itself be deletable - neologisms, OR, spam - then it could.
Treating a 3-year-old 5000-word article the same way as a one-day one-paragraph article ---- the idea that the former could possible be eligible for speedy deletion, or that a 5-day deletion discussion without actively tracking down original authors is appropriate ---- is poor form. While we don't want the typical AfD process to be made longer, we need to have a very different, longer-timeframe process for figuring out how to be good stewards of information and history that has been part of Wikipedia for a while... even when changing standards suggest such material may no longer merit main-namespace keywords.
++SJ