Rick wrote:
Fine. I give up. I will no longer list anything to be deleted, and I will stop deleting any garbage that any vandals want to add to Wikipedia.
When I see obvious vandalism, I revert. If a newbie creates an experimental page "fgh" etc. I just delete. No need to go through VfD for that sort of thing. Everything else should be cleaned up, not deleted.
When I was a newbie, I had some of my stuff listed on VfD because I didn't understand the way things are done around here - It's not nice to have you work criticized in this manner. It is off-putting, fortunately I'm thick skinned but others are not so. I've seen lots of things put on VfD because they are deemed "trivial". This is insulting to the people who put their time and effort into writing the "not important" article. Obviously the article was important to at least one person.
I've seen a large number of How-to type articles listed on VfD because they are "not encyclopaedic". Although I agree that this type of article is not what you find in a paper encyclopaedia it is often useful knowledge that potential users of Wikipedia may very well want to know, recently some people have been moving the how-to pages over to Wikibooks, which is a much more suitable place for this type of article IMO but if the deletionists got their way , much of the material may have been lost in the meantime.
Most worryingly of all. I've seen some syops delete pages based on as majority rather than a consensus. The page is broke and can't be fixed :-(
Let's have [[newbie tests]] so that non sysops can bring "hello! Paul is gay!" type pages to a sysop attention.
And [[Pages that need to be moved to other wikis]] for wikionary quotes etc
And [[Vanity pages]] for suspected vanity pages
And have everything else go to [[cleanup]]
If it doesn't work out after a while, we can always bring back VfD
Theresa
Proposal copied to talk:VfD please answer there.
Theresa
Teresa-
I think your concerns that VfD puts off contributors who might otherwise become valued long term members are very legitimate.
There is another side to the issue, though, and this is already touched upon in your post -- this attitude that just because one person cares about an article, it somehow has a place in Wikipedia. This is not the case. Wikipedia is not Everything2. There are limits to the type of content we allow -- these limits have been enumerated on [[What Wikipedia is not]] and other pages.
Already it is often very difficult to get rid of pages that contain nothing but trivia. You may feel that enumerating all the things in the world in which the number "101" appears is valuable, I think it is worthless trivia. I think that my view is supported by every legitimate philosophical understanding of the terms "knowledge" and "encyclopedia" (the latter being a sum of the former).
If we remove the VfD process entirely it will become even more difficult to remove these pages, and we will stray away even further from our goal of being an encyclopedia. Instead, our new goal will then be to be a loose collection of provably true statements. E.g. it is a true statement that the number 101 apperas in the film title "101 Dalmatians", but it is hardly of encyclopedic value. Such a collection is much harder to maintain and much more likely to be inconsistent than a true encyclopedia, and I also believe it tarnishes our reputation, because we claim to be something which we are clearly not.
Removing VfD is the wrong answer to a real problem: How do we communicate to contributors what kind of content is acceptable and what isn't? I think the real solutions are different: - improving and standardizing welcome messages - improving VfD headers and communicating with users in cases where their pages have been listed - solidifying certain policies so that they can be referred to as strict rules, rather than "rules to consider" - generally, dispelling the popular notion that Wikipedia is a place without rules by including appropriate notices on the edit pages etc.
As for the VfD process itself:
VfD is like a servant working for two masters. One master believes in rules and due process, the other believes in creative chaos and consensus. As a result, the VfD page is very confused and occasionally inconsistent. Depending on which sysop makes the final decision and which users participate in the debate, the outcome may be entirely different.
We need to make a decision as to what we want VfD to be:
1) a voting page 2) a discussion page where consensus has to be reached.
If we want it to be a voting page, then we need to set a clear threshold at which deletion can be allowed. We need to make rules as to who is allowed to vote.
If we want it to be a discussion page, we should be allowed to ignore "votes", that is, comments that merely express a preference, but not a reason. If I write a long explanation why I think a page should be deleted, I don't want the page to remain in the system just because someone quickly dropped by, looked at the page and posted a "Keep." comment. I want my arguments to be logically and soundly refuted. I want people to put up or shut up.
Given that we do not have a defined decision making process within Wikipedia, such a decision can only be made in two ways:
1) Jimbo makes it 2) Jimbo authorizes a process or a person to make it.
Until then, VfD is indeed broken, but it would hardly be fair to remove it entirely just because we haven't fixed it yet.
Regards,
Erik
I wouldn't be near as sore as I am if this was policy. Coming back and finding good stuff gone is upsetting.
Fred
From: erik_moeller@gmx.de (Erik Moeller) Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: 09 Jan 2004 20:07:00 +0100 To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Let's get rid of VfD
- improving VfD headers and communicating with users in cases where their
pages have been listed
On 01/09/04 at 08:07 PM, erik_moeller@gmx.de (Erik Moeller) said:
Already it is often very difficult to get rid of pages that contain nothing but trivia. You may feel that enumerating all the things in the world in which the number "101" appears is valuable, I think it is worthless trivia. I think that my view is supported by every legitimate philosophical understanding of the terms "knowledge" and "encyclopedia" (the latter being a sum of the former).
If we remove the VfD process entirely it will become even more difficult to remove these pages, and we will stray away even further from our goal of being an encyclopedia. Instead, our new goal will then be to be a loose collection of provably true statements. E.g. it is a true statement that the number 101 apperas in the film title "101 Dalmatians", but it is hardly of encyclopedic value. Such a collection is much harder to maintain and much more likely to be inconsistent than a true encyclopedia, and I also believe it tarnishes our reputation, because we claim to be something which we are clearly not.
These are excellent points. I think the concept of what is "encyclopedic knowledge" needs to be made more explicit. For my part, I feel I know it when I see it -- and correspondingly I know unencyclopedic material when I see it but I can't rationally explain what the difference it is -- it is an inituition. I've taken information out of articles which I consider "unencyclopedic" but when confronted about this I can't explain why.
V.