From: Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com
An example of a vanity page which is routinely deleted by unanimous vote on VFD: "John C. Shaw is a freshman in high school in Portland, Oregon. He is a fan of Indie music, and films. Near the end of eighth grade, he had pneumonia, so was taken to the hospital, where they found he also had scoliosis. He wears a brace, and will wear it for another two years. He takes it off at concerts so that he can mosh easily."
I understand why we can't generally speedy non-trivial content, but it's very inefficient to go through VFD for material that is just going to be unanimously deleted.
Can't we nominate some consistent wikipedia inclusionist to allow to delete, say, any article less than a month old or with less than two edits, they they believe would be a unanimous delete vote on VFD? Articles that they don't choose to delete would continue go through the normal VFD process. If they delete something they shouldn't it can be VFUD or speedy UD by another admin.
But articles like that doesn't really take much time to handle on VfD. Speedying those articles wouldn't really affect the VfD process much.
Here's a counterexample. Here's an article in the form in which it was nominated for VfD. The entire article:
"Jessamyn West, AKA the Rarin Librarian. One of Library Journal's Mover & Shakers, West is best known for her 'blog, librarian.net."
It turns out that Jessamyn West is the name of two people: an absolutely-100%-notable famous novelist, author of _The Friendly Persuasion_, adapted into a 1958 movie that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, etc. etc. on which we had no article.
And it's _also_ the name of a blogger, who is at least arguably notable, whose entry got about an evenly-split VfD vote and hence was kept.
The benefit of running the Jessamyn Wests through VfD outweighs the very small costs of requiring a few people to cast pro-forma "Delete, vanity" votes on the John C. Shaws.
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
On 5/30/05, Daniel P. B. Smith dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
The benefit of running the Jessamyn Wests through VfD outweighs the very small costs of requiring a few people to cast pro-forma "Delete, vanity" votes on the John C. Shaws.
Eh, I dunno about that. If the initial article is short enough that it doesn't establish sufficient notoriety to someone who thinks wikipedia should be very inclusive, then we don't really lose anything if it gets deleted before someone has had a chance to point out the notability.
You might not consider it costly to vote on a bunch of silly vanities, but it does take a fair bit of work to close the VFDs, and it's work thats done by too few people.