RickK> People like MyRedDice don't trust anyone to delete anything.

Ooh, name check! :)

I trust many people to delete many things. In particular, I'd like to compliment Angela, who always does stirling work managing votes for deletion, and has, in my eyes, an excellent grasp of consensus and wiki process. And there are of course many other people who do get work keeping the cogs of Wikipedia flowing - sadly, we only really notice them when the cogs get jammed, but I'd like to take this moment to register my appreciation for all their hard work.

RickK was responding to this comment by Ed Poor:

Ed Poor> We trust all our sysops to know what is "obvious nonsense" - Ed Poor> it's one of the key criteria for becoming a sysop: you've been around Ed Poor> long enough to show that you have good judgment.

As RickK said, I don't agree with this, though not for the reasons he gives. Different people have different ideas over what is "obvious nonsense", and with our current deletion system, I feel that Ed's approach would cause more problems than it solved. As people here know, I am one of the people who strongly feel that there are better alternatives to our current deletion system and I would like to give a quick plug (again) to:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/deletion_management_redesign

Our current "deletion policy" suggests a number of categories where deletion without listing on VfD is appropriate, including vandalism, test pages, and pages with no meaningful content or history. Although not uncontroversial, I think this approach is a good one - it doesn't eliminate judgement (that would be impossible), but rather provides a framework within which to exercise judgement.

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy

-Martin "MyRedDice" Harper