From: Mark Gallagher

its only *current* problems can be cured if we're willing to put in the effort.

Well, always one to be clever-clever, I thought I'd put Mark to the test and spend 24 hours policing AfD.

And you know what? He's right. A little less moaning on about AfD here and a bit more work on AfD itself and you can start seeing a change.

1) Cut down the size of AfD by removing the malformed ones as they appear.

2) Cut down the size of AfD by spotting the speedy ones mistakenly nominated for the full process in good faith and killing them off immediately.

3) Reverse those who would tag a disputed AfD for speedy delete anyway and administer a slap for it so they don't do it again.

4) Make those who shout "speedy delete!" state a [[WP:CSD]] criterion for it. Don't listen to squirming on the subject.

After doing those four steps - easy and satifying - you're left with an AfD process that makes more sense.

Also, you immediately see a change in user behaviour. Screams for out-of-process speedy deletions have quietened a little since this morning. A day or so more of sharp slaps to those advocating them and the problem will be in abeyance.

The nominations left are, broadly:

1) Ones that have a snowball's chance of surviving but deserve to go through the process

2) Ones that have a snowball's chance of being deleted but deserve to go through the process

3) Those where people have completely grasped the wrong end of the AfD and CSD stick

4) Those that are content disputes pretending to be AfD cases

Of those, 1 and 2 can be left to get on with it. 4 can be watched to see if the AfD process can produce a better article or solve the dispute by proxy, with no need to get involved other than to remove the speedy notices also tagged to the article by the people discussing the article.

That leave the sticky problem of 3, where the AfD process is most broken. For instance, [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John-Hedley Desmond Lucy McConnell]] deserved to be deleted under existing AfD precident. But it didn't deserve speedy deleting and certainly not under CSD-G4, having never come to AfD before, having attracted robotic "G4 speedy and edit protect" votes (and they were votes) from the clueless, and having altered in format since the first CSD deletion.

So that helps narrow down the problem with AfD (although it gets us nowhere nearer a solution).

So, as I said, Mark is right and less complaining here and more work on AfD is the best course of action.

If nothing else, an hour spent on "AfD Patrol" gets more done and gets us closer to understanding what the future for AfD is than an hour spent emailing this list.

IMHO.

->REDVERS

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