With more and more people participating in the VfD process (which is good) we need a clear and well defined policy for what to do when the 7 days are over and a sysop needs to decide whether a page should be deleted or not. The current deletion policy describes the process of a page listed on VfD as follows:
It will remain there for a time, giving other users the chance to comment on whether they think deletion is in fact appropriate. At some point an administrator will come by the page and decide to remove it for you. Unless someone else comes by and decides not to agree with you, of course!
This is a woefully inept description of the deletion process -- it does not even mention the word "consensus", let alone define it. Several pages have been deleted on the basis that a large majority (70-80%) voted for deletion, in spite of the fact that a minority (20-30%) strongly protested. I think we can agree that this is not consensus by any reasonable definition.
I see two possible solutions:
1) Set a formal threshold for deletion, maybe 75%.
2) Allow sysops to ignore votes by people who a) are not regular Wikipedia authors (less than 20 edits)
There seems to be a lot of ballot stuffing, going so far that some people post to Usenet and ask people in a group to support non-deletion of a page. We can prevent this by allowing only people with a track record to participate.
b) have not expressed any opinion beyond "keep" or "delete" and have not made any edit to the page in question.
This might help to address the problem that some people oppose almost every deletion on priniciple, making consensus very hard to reach.
I would like to ask Jimbo to make a formal declaration of policy so that sysops won't be accused of overstepping their bounds when deleting pages. Solution 2) would making deleting considerably harder than it is now (because right now, although we *say* we work by consensus, we often do not), whereas 1) would largely formalize what is currently going on. I have no strong opinion either way, but we need to have clear rules.
Regards,
Erik