On 10/7/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/7/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
Not if they're just offered without justification. You have to explain WHY you think they're notable or not notable, or you're just offering an unsupported conclusion.
I think this is a problem we'll always have with use of shorthand. Elsewhere on this mailing list today we've seen the action of informal community consensus during editing seriously mischaracterized by use of the shorthands "tag team" and "meat puppet".
The specific problem with the shorthand "not notable" is precisely that it doesn't give a single clue to the person reading it, what would constitute notability.
The problem is that we need shorthand in the first place. Issues like whether or not articles on high schools are ever deletable, and if so what factors should be taken into consideration, should be decided first. The problem with VFD is that the same questions get raised over and over and over again. That's why we need shorthand. If the issues were discussed on a higher level, then the full arguments could be laid out. Of course, if issues were discussed on a higher level it'd be a lot harder to get consensus for deletion. Most deletions would be speedy ones, although there would be room for voting/discussion over grey areas in the definitions. Erik had a proposal well over a year ago which would look something like this. In essence, a nomination would have to give a clear reason (which was already agreed upon by consensus), and the votes/discussion would be solely limited to whether or not the nominated article fit within that reason.
Also as noted earlier by a number of editors: the fact that a subject may
not be notable isn't in itself a good reason for deleting the article. Nearly all AfDs for notability are prima facie merge candidates upon which nobody has as yet attempted a merge.
Apparently you're using the term "notable" to mean "extraordinary". In that case, yes, a subject need not be extraordinary to be kept in the encyclopedia.
I wonder if we could agree to change policy to permit an administrator to
"speedy redirect" a merge candidate and close an AfD where notability is the sole or principal reason given for deletion, or no reason is given. This would be a good way of ensuring that the possibility of merging articles was not unreasonably neglected. An article could always be renominated if good faith attempts to merge had failed.
Any user is permitted to "speedy redirect" a merge candidate. Whether or not a clearly improper VFD entry can be removed is less clear, but if it can be removed then it shouldn't be only administrators that can do it.