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.