Can anyone quickly get me up to speed on when Redirects for Deletion... sorry. Redirects for "discussion" became a toxic hellhole of idiocy that makes the rest of our deletion procedures look sane?
Seriously. People are nominating perfectly sane if misguided redirects for deletion because no articles use them. Things like [[Cammy (Street Fighter)]] are up because there's no other Cammy articles. Which is fine, but someone who doesn't know that and is trying to guess our naming conventions could type in. Similarly, we have people seriously suggesting that [[The Twilight Zone (pinball)]] is not a reasonable redirect for [[Twilight Zone (pinball)]].
Seriously. When did we begin purging redirects, which are possibly the most harmless thing imaginable on Wikipedia. These are not offensive or POV redirects. They're sensible things that people might well guess when trying to type in an article name.
-Phil
On 7/19/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Can anyone quickly get me up to speed on when Redirects for Deletion... sorry. Redirects for "discussion" became a toxic hellhole of idiocy that makes the rest of our deletion procedures look sane?
Seriously. People are nominating perfectly sane if misguided redirects for deletion because no articles use them. Things like [[Cammy (Street Fighter)]] are up because there's no other Cammy articles. Which is fine, but someone who doesn't know that and is trying to guess our naming conventions could type in. Similarly, we have people seriously suggesting that [[The Twilight Zone (pinball)]] is not a reasonable redirect for [[Twilight Zone (pinball)]].
Seriously. When did we begin purging redirects, which are possibly the most harmless thing imaginable on Wikipedia. These are not offensive or POV redirects. They're sensible things that people might well guess when trying to type in an article name.
Not only harmless, but quite valuable. Traditional encyclos are quite close to the chest with their authority files -- of which the set of redirects is an integral part.
SJ
On 7/19/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Seriously. People are nominating perfectly sane if misguided redirects for deletion because no articles use them. Things like [[Cammy (Street Fighter)]] are up because there's no other Cammy articles. Which is fine, but someone who doesn't know that and is trying to guess our naming conventions could type in. Similarly, we have people seriously suggesting that [[The Twilight Zone (pinball)]] is not a reasonable redirect for [[Twilight Zone (pinball)]].
These are the same people who also see nothing wrong with doing a "merge and delete" with every duplicate article that pops up where a preventative redirect should have been.
I had a long discussion with one of them, who ended up saying something like "only the correct title should appear in the results of [[Special:Search]]".
I told him that was complete B.S. because if we even half of the redirects and disambiguation pages that we should have, nobody would ever see the "Special:Search" screen unless they are intentionally using that feature (even with database dumps and, of course, Google available -- hello!).
Judging by the titles you mentioned I would say the idiots you are dealing with on RFD are probably there because somebody told them they were too stupid for AFD (but they still need to meet a certain quota of project-space edits).
—C.W.
On 7/20/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Similarly, we have people seriously suggesting that [[The Twilight Zone (pinball)]] is not a reasonable redirect for [[Twilight Zone (pinball)]].
And the nominator is so hell bent on getting the redirect deleted that not only did he nominate but he tried to vote twice.
On 7/20/07, Ron Ritzman ritzman@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/20/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Similarly, we have people seriously suggesting that [[The Twilight Zone (pinball)]] is not a reasonable redirect for [[Twilight Zone (pinball)]].
And the nominator is so hell bent on getting the redirect deleted that not only did he nominate but he tried to vote twice.
Not surprised. Again, it's broken. Nominations by accounts whose first activity on Wikipedia is an AfD, votes by editors who've done nothing but participate in AfD, and my personal favorite of the editor who deleted something, then nominated it for deletion based upon it missing what he had just deleted. So, someone tried to vote twice? Not a surprise.
KP
On 7/20/07, K P kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
And the nominator is so hell bent on getting the redirect deleted that not only did he nominate but he tried to vote twice.
Not surprised. Again, it's broken.
It's some of the people who are broken.
Nominations by accounts whose first activity on Wikipedia is an AfD, votes by editors who've done nothing but participate in AfD, and my personal favorite of the editor who deleted something, then nominated it for deletion based upon it missing what he had just deleted.
This come back to my favorite question. "Are you here to participate in writing an online encyclopedia or are you here to do "X"?". Sometimes "X" is deleting stuff. A well rounded editor will see something he thinks is a problem in the course of his other activities, take it to XFD, see what happens, shrug and get on with his wikilife. Someone here just to delete will do everything in his power, good faith or otherwise, to eliminate his chosen targets and rant and rave when he doesn't get his way.
As far as new accounts nominating and voting in XFDs, I can assume good faith and consider that he's an experienced anon editor who created the account because anons can't nominate. It's hard to do that when the chosen username is something like "whydoesthisexist".
On Saturday 21 July 2007 08:46, Ron Ritzman wrote:
This come back to my favorite question. "Are you here to participate in writing an online encyclopedia or are you here to do "X"?".
This brought something to mind: Why do we care WHY someone is here in the first place, or WHAT he spends most of his time here doing, as long as he is polite and amiable in his interactions and the contributions he DOES make to article-space, however insignificant or minute, are nonetheless beneficial?
On 7/21/07, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
On Saturday 21 July 2007 08:46, Ron Ritzman wrote:
This come back to my favorite question. "Are you here to participate in writing an online encyclopedia or are you here to do "X"?".
This brought something to mind: Why do we care WHY someone is here in the first place, or WHAT he spends most of his time here doing, as long as he is polite and amiable in his interactions and the contributions he DOES make to article-space, however insignificant or minute, are nonetheless beneficial? -- Kurt Weber kmw@armory.com
We care why someone is here in the first place, because, in fact, it appears that those who are not here to write an encyclopedia are the most likely to be those with non-polite, non-amiable interactions, not making useful contributions to article-space.
There's a lot of time on Wikipedia spent dealing with certain people, not writing articles.
One of my least favorite Wikipedians, a rather weird deletionist, recently threatened to come to plants and start writing articles. I invited him to do so, because, the fact is, he spends so much time freaking out when anyone disagrees with him that the chance he'll ever show up and write an article is 0.
He's not here to write an encyclopedia, he's not polite, he's not amiable (although I'd grant him that if he met the first). I don't know what he's here to do, it appears he's here to whine to people and bully them, but that can't be a goal in itself.
I like sharing my knowledge and research skills with Wikipedia, plus I work on-line, and I can do it while scanning and editing.
It should be a lot more fun than it is, though, and it's not, because there are so many people at Wikipedia who aren't there to write an encyclopedia.
Some of our best editors make only insignificant or minute article-space edits, those who copyedit, spellcheck, and do the real janitorial chores, or what would be the real janitorial chores if not for all of the folks here for some other reason.
IMO.
KP
On 7/21/07, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
This brought something to mind: Why do we care WHY someone is here in the first place, or WHAT he spends > most of his time here doing, as long as he is polite and amiable
Nothing wrong with that as long as they stay polite and amiable when they discover that due to policy and/or consensus, they can't do "X" anymore. If they go on to other things, here or elsewhere, then cool. If they throw wikitantrums, then that's a problem.
Phil Sandifer wrote:
Can anyone quickly get me up to speed on when Redirects for Deletion... sorry. Redirects for "discussion" became a toxic hellhole of idiocy that makes the rest of our deletion procedures look sane?
I've taken the liberty to "speedy keep" three or four frivolous nominations. I hope I've done this correctly.
Timwi
On 7/25/07, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
Can anyone quickly get me up to speed on when Redirects for Deletion... sorry. Redirects for "discussion" became a toxic hellhole of idiocy that makes the rest of our deletion procedures look sane?
I've taken the liberty to "speedy keep" three or four frivolous nominations. I hope I've done this correctly.
Timwi
I simply hope you've done it, as there have been quite a few lately. KP