Jake Nelson wrote:
(Sidenote: While Jimbo and others assert that BLP issues are our biggest PR issue (and while I can understand completely why they'd think so), in my experience, AFD has done far more damage, and has made enemies out of a lot of people who wanted to help us.)
Me Too. I have a local friend who uses Wikipedia a lot (he's a high school teacher) and I use him as an "outside view" sometimes on how Wikipedia is doing. Every couple of weeks he comes to me and tells me of the heartache of stumbling upon an article about some subject he's deeply interested in only to find an AfD banner across the top and know that it's likely going to vanish soon. He's now reluctant to look stuff up recreationally for fear of coming across more of those, and forget about actually _editing_ anything.
His most recent discovery was AfDs on stub articles about episodes of Lost that hadn't aired yet (but barring the unexpected destruction of TV as we know it soon would) on the basis of Wikipedia not being a crystal ball. That's just dumb, the pages will be recreated when the episodes air. It makes us look irrationally deletion-happy.