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