On 6/16/06, Cobb sealclubbingfun@googlemail.com wrote:
"George Herbert" wrote, AFD is not an acceptable substitute for a cleanup notice and some cleanup efforts.
I didn't say that it was... but you snipped all that out, and just replied to the bit that suited you.
I snipped down to what I felt your focal point was. However, if you insist, then here's that paragraph in toto.
But... the only reason this AFD was "keep" is because of the number of Star Wars voters. Take a look at the history of the article too. Short of slashing and burning it (and then it may as well have been deleted), it's not going to get any better because it was named for and written from a fictional viewpoint by masses of fans who cannot tell real from imaginary... and as a result it is fundmentally unencyclopedic. It should have been deleted, if only to preserve the illusion that AFD isn't a big joke and to give it a chance to start again (with a different name).
The comment "because it was named for and written from a fictional viewpoint by masses of fans who cannot tell real from imaginary" seems odd to me. They don't own the article. If I had bandwidth today I could hop on over there and start doing a major edit on it. Or you could, or we both could. The majority of the active current contributors being fans doesn't mean that we can't fix it.
You seem to think that AFD is a big joke because we have bad articles surviving. My point, and several others point, is that we have bad articles on appropriate encyclopedic topics survive AFD, and my argument is that that's entirely proper since we should be doing cleanups on them instead of arguing about deleting them. When you just go in and AFD it, part of the perceived point is that you believe that it's not a topic worthy of being in Wikipedia. In some cases that's not the AFDers intent, but largely it is.
WP editors and admins seem to be largely inclusionary, so you've already lost many of those battles. When you lose it by a landslide because of a bunch of energetic Star Wars fans' it's making another more unfortunate point as well. In a sense, every time AFD is misused in this manner, trying to "clean up" an article on a valid topic by AFDing it and perhaps recreating it, it brings disrepute to the process and a lot of "no" voters in. We would be better off if such AFDs weren't called in the first place. AFD should be the last final response to an unsalvagable article after you've tried cleanup tags, getting involved in cleaning it up, and asking other editors to help if the article's usual editors feel too much ownership and keep doing unencyclopedic things.