Jack Lynch wrote:
Actually, ed has pissed me off about as often and thoroughly as he was able, and I ''still'' say he did the right thing here, and has nothing to apologise for. VfD deserves deletion, and I seem to remember Jimbo considering deleting it himself about a year ago. The '''worst''' aspect of the wiki is its "wiki-democracy", and all its ugly manifestations. The majority has no claim to the truth, esp. when its a majority of those who happen to know about some obscure vote, failing to announce it to anyone other than their partisan cronies.
The problem with the proposals to do away with it is that none so far has proposed anything better (or at least people haven't been convinced the alternative proposals are better). There is plenty of stuff that goes through VfD that ought to be deleted; only a small percentage of the stuff on VfD is contentious in any way.
If VfD is done away with and no alternative deletion process is provided, then those types of pages will simply be speedy-deleted. In itself that would be fine, since the majority are obvious, but having a VfD process helps sometimes IMO, because occasionally an admin will mis-identify something as an obvious deletion candidate when it really shouldn't be, and others will point out his error before the page is actually deleted.
-Mark