On 8/15/06, Mark Ryan ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
Stories about AfDs failing (for no consensus) because votes are evenly split between "redirect" and "delete" are absurd, because all of the voters clearly do not want the article to continue to exist in its present form.
Surely the opposite can also be said of a "keep" consensus AfD: most of the voters plainly want the article to continue to exist as an article, not as a redirect and not deleted.
I've raised this issue several times: No one has really decided what "keeping" or "deleting" means. Are we talking about content, or entries in the article name space? Every time I merge two articles, have I actually deleted an article out of process? Is there any difference between deleting an article (but moving its content to another article and setting up a redirect) and merging two articles?
One day we will learn to distinguish between the two fundamentally different concepts:
*Banning an article topic: deciding that we do not, for the foreseeable future, want a top-level article about a certain topic - usually because it's too obscure or inherently unencyclopaedic or even POV *Removing content: Taking out chunks of text from an article, usually because it's too crufty, unverifiable, or massively violates one of our policies.
The first case is fairly rare, but does need some sort of formal policy to decide if the topic - regardless of what's currently been written about it - should exist in Wikipedia. Norman Technologies might be a good example - we just decide if that company is "notable", and if it's not, then we definitely never (for a short term definition of never, like a year) want an article on it - regardless of the current content.
The second case happens all the time and *does not* need a formal process. It simply needs a couple of clueful people to show up, say "this stuff shouldn't be here" and to move it to the talk page so people can work out what to do with it, if anything.
The case of merging/replacing with redirects is similar: a few people discuss and merge the two articles if consensus agrees that a separate article is unjustified.
Until we collectively agree on this kind of reasoning, stupid AfDs will keep happening. Frequently.
Steve