From: "Ron Ritzman" ritzman@gmail.com
While "I've never heard of it" might rarely be used in an AFD, it might be what motivates one to file with a more "professional" sounding reason. Of course this is speculation on my part.
Wait a minute here. Say someone nominates an article for deletion as failing to meet notability criteria, in an area where I am not an expert but would expect to have heard of the truly notable items. I'm trying.
If I've heard of it, I'm inclined to think it's notable, because I'm not an expert.
I'm only going to _consider_ deleting it if I _haven't_ heard of it.
Anything dishonest so far?
OK, next step. I perform what I call "due diligence." This means making some kind of independent effort on my own to determine whether the item is notable. For example, if it's a book, I have a personal criterion which is that anything with an Amazon sales rank number greater than 200,000 is not notable, and, similarly, a person whose claim to notability is authorship who has not authored a book with an Amazon sales rank greater than 200,000 is not notable. The point is not whether this is a great test; the point is that it's my own test and it's usually independent of what has gone before.
That is, I base my judgement on seeing for myself, rather than deciding which of the people who have gone before have made the cleverest remark or anything like that.
Then I vote.
And you would characterize this as "motivated by 'I've never heard of it' but filing with a 'more professional-sounding reason?'"
What do you think would be honest behavior? Always voting "keep" on items you've never heard of?