Life's not that easy. I at least agree with them that most of the articles in question are not candidates for a Pulitzer Prize. The most controversy seems to be rooted in whether the topic is important enough. There is a need to stop considering importance as an exercise in naval gazing. Articles about individual high schools are of absolutely no importance to me; I only went to one. No-one has yet written about it. I do not have the knowledge base to write about any other. How much time would I need to spend making myself sufficiently well-informed to pass judgement on somebody else's school? I know too that tomorrow I'll need to do the same thing over about some other school. I prefer to suspend my egocentrism long enough to recognize that the school that's put on VfD to-day may be important to somebody else, and have enough time left to make a positive contribution.
Ec
Uncle Jiang wrote:
Why don't we encourage whoever listed the item in the first place to remove the item if it was inappropriate? Leave a note on the person's talk page asking them to remove it or remove it yourself and then allow the person the option of relisting it if he still disagrees. Of course, if we have a good number of people voting "delete" then the listing should obviously not be removed, but when consensus overwhelmingly to keep, what is the point of keeping the item listed?
Jiang
Ray Saintonge wrote:
That's nice in theory. Still, there is a clique that tends to scream bloody murder if you remove things before they feel the time has come. Some of us would be glad to remove such items from the list as soon as they appear, but are not prepared to face all the bitching without backup.
If a member of the deletionist clique puts something on VfD he has immediate backup from his colleagues based on their mutual trust. For the rest of us the amount of time required to properly deal with these issues is a huge distraction from positive contributions.
I don't know if more policies will help. A fair and consistent applications may be more beneficial. Maybe anyone who has been around for at least a year should feel free to remove anything from the VfD without having to run the gauntlet.