On 6/19/06, Cobb sealclubbingfun@googlemail.com wrote:
The problem is, I think, that lots of people who comment here don't actually take part in AFD. They don't see the day-to-day crap... they just see a system that keeps struggling along despite being hopelessly broken and unscalable. AFD is such a demented system that it's very often less hassle to just ignore rubbish than even try to get it deleted. No doubt certain inclusionist factions on Wikipedia rather like things that way, and claim it is a self-regulating mechanism rather than a system that cannot cope and which people avoid.
I greatly disagree. Though I've not been very active in the last few weeks, AFD in the time I've been on Wikipedia (last year, roughly) has made the right decision most of the time, and looking at the various nominations, the vast majority are pretty uncontroversial.
AFD is fine for dealing with noncontroversial deletions. So is Prod, but any lone individual can de-Prod legitimately, so AFD is a fair fallback for that.
AFD is a clunky mechanism for dealing with contentious deletions. But even in those cases, it seems to largely work out ok in the end.
Contentious deletions would be helped, in my opinion, if the nominators had gone through the policy steps of marking bad articles for cleanup, attempting to get them cleaned up, etc prior to AFDing them. People argue less about things which were listed for cleanup for a month or two and nobody bothered to salvage.