Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote
charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I don't accept the framing. As far as I'm concerned, a deletion is an assertion that the topic is unwelcome. In other words that no useful stub can be made. Not that _no useful stub can be made out of the words on the page_. I'm sure we used to be better at this.
Maybe we did, back when we had fewer than two million articles and fewer than a million users, and were not a top-ten site making us an essential part of any vanity, spam or POV-pushing campaign.
Well, this is a live issue. What is the correct level of due diligence for a deleting admin? If it is a funny foreign-sounding name (to native English speakers), or written in bad English, do you do more or less before deleting? Do you think first what the encyclopedia needs, or do you cite policy and say "just following orders"?
Tomorrow, I think, the problem gets exacerbated by re-enabling article creation by IP numbers? That "announcement" was not retracted, I think. So New Pages patrollers get Space Invaders with double aliens. Are we going to benefit with new articles that will correct systematic bias, or, per Guy, will _even less be done_, in an average case, to salvage the articles we are really short of?
Charles
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On 2007.11.08 09:38:51 +0000, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com scribbled 0 lines:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote
charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I don't accept the framing. As far as I'm concerned, a deletion is an assertion that the topic is unwelcome. In other words that no useful stub can be made. Not that _no useful stub can be made out of the words on the page_. I'm sure we used to be better at this.
Maybe we did, back when we had fewer than two million articles and fewer than a million users, and were not a top-ten site making us an essential part of any vanity, spam or POV-pushing campaign.
Well, this is a live issue. What is the correct level of due diligence for a deleting admin? If it is a funny foreign-sounding name (to native English speakers), or written in bad English, do you do more or less before deleting? Do you think first what the encyclopedia needs, or do you cite policy and say "just following orders"?
Tomorrow, I think, the problem gets exacerbated by re-enabling article creation by IP numbers? That "announcement" was not retracted, I think. So New Pages patrollers get Space Invaders with double aliens. Are we going to benefit with new articles that will correct systematic bias, or, per Guy, will _even less be done_, in an average case, to salvage the articles we are really short of?
Charles
The sketchy statistics seem to show nothing (article creation rate, percentage deleted) changed when IP creation was disabled. Why should we believe that that would change?
On a more humorous note, even if increased the crappy article rate, that might be a good thing - at least then the deletionists will be kept busy taking care of those and not going after good articles. Idle hands, and all that.
-- gwern 64 JRB Iris Bruxelles Tajik uk Goodwin FIPS140-1 FLETC Armani
On Thu, 8 Nov 2007 9:38:51 +0000, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Well, this is a live issue. What is the correct level of due diligence for a deleting admin? If it is a funny foreign-sounding name (to native English speakers), or written in bad English, do you do more or less before deleting? Do you think first what the encyclopedia needs, or do you cite policy and say "just following orders"?
It varies. If the funny foreign-sounding word is the name of a company or product, and the article is packed full of peacock terms, and the creator has no contributions to anything else, then I might very well delete without feeling any guilt whatsoever.
Here's a problem, though: there is a tendency to assume bad faith on the part of deleting admins, and not to address bad speedy tagging by RC patrollers. I completely support any initiative to educate those who patrol recent changes, to persuade them to make better use of {{prod}} and {{afd}} rather than {{db}}.
I also completely support the idea of renaming AFD to "articles for discussion" - which in practice it is, since merge is a common outcome but is not deletion. "Cleanup in 7 days or nuke" would seem to me to be a reasonable approach to badly sourced articles.
Still, let's not forget that there are two separate issues here which manifest in a way that makes them very difficult to separate. There is the clueless newbie, keen to document a Great New Thing they found; and there is the die-hard spammer, keen to document the Great New Thing they are selling.
Any extended period at [[Special:Newpages]] will rapidly lead to the latter becoming the default assumption, because it happens so much more often. Or at least that's my experience.
Perhaps what is missing is a triage stage between RC patrol identifying a likely problematic article, and the deletion category. Clearing CAT:CSD of a backlog of hundreds is fundamentally incompatible with being truly diligent about anything.
Guy (JzG)
[This is long, but hopefully helpful. You may want to skip the first part and move to the second, which is the actual proposed solution]
On 08/11/2007, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
Here's a problem, though: there is a tendency to assume bad faith on the part of deleting admins,
(I don't think we're assuming bad faith so much as we're assuming laziness... or that they assume good faith of the taggers too much!)
and not to address bad speedy tagging by RC patrollers. I completely support any initiative to educate those who patrol recent changes, to persuade them to make better use of {{prod}} and {{afd}} rather than {{db}}.
Indeed. However, bad speedy tagging - through misunderstanding or overenthusiasm - is inevitable, so our admins are always going to have to stay on their toes and make judgements as to whether or not deletion is appropriate. If we make the tagging better, maybe they'll only have to discard 5% of them and not 50%. But there'll still be discards or proddings or whatever, and there will be enough of them they still need to treat it as likely.
Perhaps what is missing is a triage stage between RC patrol identifying a likely problematic article, and the deletion category. Clearing CAT:CSD of a backlog of hundreds is fundamentally incompatible with being truly diligent about anything.
The problem is that the process, as set up now, has a triage stage - the deleting admin. It's categorised for deletion; the admin decides to concur (delete), vacillate (pass to prod or AFD), or object (detag). They're our decision-making process.
I'm not sure creating a specific triage "step" would achieve much. Let's consider...
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Say we create a decision-making stage between tagging and actually listing for deletion in CSD. This stage would either: a) make irrevocable decisions on delete/don't delete, so we could just nuke anything they put in CSD; or b) do a first pass at weeding out the obvious keeps, so we would still need to make decisions on the material they put in CSD.
In the case of a), would we really need to have the deletion category? If any material placed there is going to be deleted near-automatically, we might as well just do the deletion rather than relabelling it for imminent deletion; save twenty seconds. Even if they don't press the button themselves, labelling for imminent deletion is about as effective - and we thus have our triagers doing the deleting step, whether by their own hand or by someone else's as proxy, which is what we have now.
In the case of b), we'd end up with... well, with CSD as it is now, split into two categories, one "filtered" and one not, but admins would still have to be paying attention to the content of pages in the filtered category.
Net result: either way, it is basically the same as CSD today.
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As you can see, I'm not sold on adding another step to the speedy-deletion process as being the solution - we're just going to have to impress on people that they need to pay more attention to the triaging, whatever way we go about things.
What might be a more productive approach is to look at disentangling the two roles of CSD...
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Currently, there are two types of material that go in CSD, at least in theory.
a) Patently obvious stuff, that no-one would argue we ought to keep (and material we ought to keep that got mistagged) - speedy means expedited, uncontentious, no process
b) Stuff that needs to be deleted *right now* - speedy means, well, *fast*.
(The latter is a subset of the former, but let's split them for the moment - a) is the stuff that isn't actually harmful or damaging)
Because of the presence of b), and the fact the material is mixed together with no distinction made between the classes, we have an apparent sense of urgency to Get It Cleared, Get Them Deleted, Do It Soon. But, in practice, the material in a) can linger - oh, we don't want to keep it around for days on end, but it doesn't matter if it's dealt with now or after lunch.
What makes this division interesting is that, in general, the "bad speedies" - things that aren't really speediable but someone thought they were - would fall into category a). if it seems harmful or damaging, it almost certainly *ought* to be deleted, with a quick glance at the history to make sure it isn't just a vandalised page.
How about we split CSD, to reflect these two sides?
i) Material for "urgent deletion"
ii) Material for "simple deletion"
Material in i) would be vandalism, attack pages, etc etc; ii) would be all the gibberish and spam and vanity and dead redirects and other housekeeping.
Critically, because of the nature of the "bad calls", discussed above, we have a nice split whereby material in i) *can* easily be knocked off quickly without needing to dig too far - because it is much more likely to be legitimately deletable - and material in ii), which we accept may get backlogged and may hang around for some time, is the material that we are likely to need to spend more time looking at.
ii would tend to become a sort of "speedy PROD", I guess; it gets tagged and might go in ten minutes, might be a day. Certainly this sort of material conceptually resembles PROD a lot... the split between CSD.ii and PROD is an open question. We might end up merging the two approaches somehow, but that's another matter.
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How does that sound? I suspect it would solve a lot of the problems relating to real or presumed urgency, and would keep people from feeling they had to move fast on disputable material. It would also allow us to expedite dealing with the actually damaging stuff, which is a plus in anyone's book.
On Thu, 8 Nov 2007 18:21:38 +0000, "Andrew Gray" shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
(I don't think we're assuming bad faith so much as we're assuming laziness... or that they assume good faith of the taggers too much!)
Well, yes, or some combination of good intentions and bad experience.
Indeed. However, bad speedy tagging - through misunderstanding or overenthusiasm - is inevitable, so our admins are always going to have to stay on their toes and make judgements as to whether or not deletion is appropriate. If we make the tagging better, maybe they'll only have to discard 5% of them and not 50%. But there'll still be discards or proddings or whatever, and there will be enough of them they still need to treat it as likely.
Sure. The unanswerable question, at this stage, is how many invalid speedy tags are correctly either untagged or userfied or whatever by the admins toiling away at CAT:CSD? I would imagine the chances of error rise on the days when the backlog is in the hundreds, and I don't think that's necessarily fixable, we all make more mistakes when we feel under pressure even if the pressure is self-imposed.
How about we split CSD, to reflect these two sides? i) Material for "urgent deletion" ii) Material for "simple deletion" Material in i) would be vandalism, attack pages, etc etc; ii) would be all the gibberish and spam and vanity and dead redirects and other housekeeping. Critically, because of the nature of the "bad calls", discussed above, we have a nice split whereby material in i) *can* easily be knocked off quickly without needing to dig too far - because it is much more likely to be legitimately deletable - and material in ii), which we accept may get backlogged and may hang around for some time, is the material that we are likely to need to spend more time looking at.
ii would tend to become a sort of "speedy PROD", I guess; it gets tagged and might go in ten minutes, might be a day. Certainly this sort of material conceptually resembles PROD a lot... the split between CSD.ii and PROD is an open question. We might end up merging the two approaches somehow, but that's another matter.
How does that sound? I suspect it would solve a lot of the problems relating to real or presumed urgency, and would keep people from feeling they had to move fast on disputable material. It would also allow us to expedite dealing with the actually damaging stuff, which is a plus in anyone's book.
It works for me, anyway. What I want to see is a system where damaging and unambiguous crap (attack pages, copyright violations, test pages, obscenity and the like) is dispatched as fast as possible, with the balance being given at least a little bit of thought.
The problem is that unsourced biographies are in my view dangerous, and many of these are actually user pages created "by mistake" (ahem) in mainspace. I don't know how we deal with that in your proposed system, but that does not mean it is a fundamentally bad idea, actually I think it's a fundamentally *good* idea.
Guy (JzG)
On 08/11/2007, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
How about we split CSD, to reflect these two sides? i) Material for "urgent deletion" ii) Material for "simple deletion"
I like this idea.
How to get it to fly at WT:CSD? That's where something like this is more likely to have to capture hearts and minds.
- d.
On Thu, 8 Nov 2007 21:24:33 +0000, "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
How to get it to fly at WT:CSD? That's where something like this is more likely to have to capture hearts and minds.
Run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.
Guy (JzG)
On 08/11/2007, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Thu, 8 Nov 2007 21:24:33 +0000, "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
How to get it to fly at WT:CSD? That's where something like this is more likely to have to capture hearts and minds.
Run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.
Probably the best approach. I'm going to drop offline for a couple of days, so I'll thiink something out in my copious free time (three hour bus journeys, yay) and post it when I get back. Nothing worse than floating a proposal and then vanishing...