Sam Korn wrote:
On 11/20/05, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
That looks like a different premise contributing to our disagreement, then, because I'd count that as "keeping" the article and therefore as the merge vote being interpreted as "keep". A vote that wasn't interpreted as either keep or delete would just be equivalent to a "comment" or somesuch.
You're talking from a black and white point of view. I'm talking from a greyscale (or perhaps even 24-bit colour) view. I say merge is separate from keep. People who vote "merge" clearly don't mean "keep", because otherwise *they'd have damn well said it*. So don't appropriate votes to suit your point of view.
Yes, I know, I already explicitly said I was seeing this as a black and white issue. And as I explained, I believe that it fundamentally _is_ black and white; at the end of the day the closing admin will either press the "delete" link or he won't press the "delete" link. Merge votes push that decision in the "don't press the delete link" direction, and so they look more like keep votes than delete votes to me. This isn't an attempt to "appropriate" them, just pointing out what their actual effect is. I don't see why this is such a matter of contention.
I agree that pages that need merging don't need AfD, but sometimes AfD gives pages that need merging. Are you really going to take the rules-lawyer approach and say that an AfD cannot give a merge consensus? That is what you might call "rigid officialism".
When did I ever say that? If an AfD comes along and lots of people suggest merging the article into some other article, then it would take a pretty strange interpretation of rules to try to forbid merging the article after the AfD is done simply because AfD's not supposed to be used solely to make those decisions. People also suggest things like "clean up spelling" or "remove the bright purple tables" or whatever, and those are often good ones too. My point is that if there's an AfD and lots of people suggest merging the article, that shouldn't be taken to mean that the article should be _deleted_.