An article named [[Characters in the Animal Crossing series]], which was crufty and about characters in a Nintendo video game, got listed in June for deletion by [[User:A Man In Black]]. That user cited its game-guide nature as a reason for its deletion. The article passed the AfD with a consensus to "keep", about 7 users to 2.
Less than a month later, [[User:Aaron Brenneman]] replaced the article's contents with a redirect to [[Animal Crossing]], the article on the first game in the series. He cited on the talk page his reasons for doing this as being: "no sources, multiple clean up tags, better dealt with in parent article, unencyclopedic tone".
This redirection was left alone for almost a month, until [[User:A Link to the Past]], one of the voters in the AfD, noticed the redirection and reverted it. This led to a revert war with the original deletion nominator, A Man In Black, who seemed keen to enforce this redirection which had accomplished what his failed AfD did not.
Upon my questioning of him about it, A Man In Black seemed nonchalant about this redirection ignoring consensus reached on the AfD, saying that the article is substandard (etc) and the AfD consensus should be effectively ignored, in favour of his own personal opinion about its encyclopedic nature (or lack thereof). I encouraged him to start another AfD, but he said he did not want it to be deleted, simply redirected.
Which brings me to the main reason for this email (thank you for reading this far, all 3 of you!). Deleting an article with a strong "keep" AfD vote is clearly against consensus and therefore a violation of deletion policy. But is changing the article into a redirect to be considered effectively the same as a deletion, for these purposes?
Stories about AfDs failing (for no consensus) because votes are evenly split between "redirect" and "delete" are absurd, because all of the voters clearly do not want the article to continue to exist in its present form.
Surely the opposite can also be said of a "keep" consensus AfD: most of the voters plainly want the article to continue to exist as an article, not as a redirect and not deleted.
~Mark Ryan
On 8/15/06, Mark Ryan ultrablue@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
Surely the opposite can also be said of a "keep" consensus AfD: most of the voters plainly want the article to continue to exist as an article, not as a redirect and not deleted.
I haven't looked at the articles in question, so perhaps I'm off the mark in this case... But if people aren't willing to put some skin in their participation then there isn't much cause for us to heed their view. If the article is in terrible need of cleanup and none of the people arguing to keep it are willing to do the *work*, then I don't see a problem with someone else coming by and cleaning it up by merging it. (And yes, sometimes the best merge adds nothing to the merge target)...
In any case, redirecting it isn't ignoring the AfD... we consider 'merge and redirect' to be equal to 'keep' in an AfD. Perhaps doing so is incorrect because we really should be discussing the existence of an article at that name, but that is what is done today.
On 8/15/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/15/06, Mark Ryan ultrablue@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
Surely the opposite can also be said of a "keep" consensus AfD: most of the voters plainly want the article to continue to exist as an article, not as a redirect and not deleted.
I haven't looked at the articles in question, so perhaps I'm off the mark in this case... But if people aren't willing to put some skin in their participation then there isn't much cause for us to heed their view. If the article is in terrible need of cleanup and none of the people arguing to keep it are willing to do the *work*, then I don't see a problem with someone else coming by and cleaning it up by merging it. (And yes, sometimes the best merge adds nothing to the merge target)...
In any case, redirecting it isn't ignoring the AfD... we consider 'merge and redirect' to be equal to 'keep' in an AfD. Perhaps doing so is incorrect because we really should be discussing the existence of an article at that name, but that is what is done today.
Exactly. And as to the other question, an AfD that is evenly-split between redirect and delete could be closed as no consensus, but the proper course of action would be to "default" the article to a redirect.
An AfD ultimately comes down to two results: delete, and don't delete. Don't delete includes no consensus, redirect, merge, and anything that results in the article history still being available to no-admins. An article with an AfD result of "Don't delete" can go to another "don't delete" through normal editorial actions and doesn't require an AfD to dictate. In other words, even an article with an AfD result of Keep can be merged or simply redirected through normal editorial actions (ie, through consensus, discussion, even common sense).
On 8/15/06, Mark Ryan ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
Stories about AfDs failing (for no consensus) because votes are evenly split between "redirect" and "delete" are absurd, because all of the voters clearly do not want the article to continue to exist in its present form.
Surely the opposite can also be said of a "keep" consensus AfD: most of the voters plainly want the article to continue to exist as an article, not as a redirect and not deleted.
I've raised this issue several times: No one has really decided what "keeping" or "deleting" means. Are we talking about content, or entries in the article name space? Every time I merge two articles, have I actually deleted an article out of process? Is there any difference between deleting an article (but moving its content to another article and setting up a redirect) and merging two articles?
One day we will learn to distinguish between the two fundamentally different concepts:
*Banning an article topic: deciding that we do not, for the foreseeable future, want a top-level article about a certain topic - usually because it's too obscure or inherently unencyclopaedic or even POV *Removing content: Taking out chunks of text from an article, usually because it's too crufty, unverifiable, or massively violates one of our policies.
The first case is fairly rare, but does need some sort of formal policy to decide if the topic - regardless of what's currently been written about it - should exist in Wikipedia. Norman Technologies might be a good example - we just decide if that company is "notable", and if it's not, then we definitely never (for a short term definition of never, like a year) want an article on it - regardless of the current content.
The second case happens all the time and *does not* need a formal process. It simply needs a couple of clueful people to show up, say "this stuff shouldn't be here" and to move it to the talk page so people can work out what to do with it, if anything.
The case of merging/replacing with redirects is similar: a few people discuss and merge the two articles if consensus agrees that a separate article is unjustified.
Until we collectively agree on this kind of reasoning, stupid AfDs will keep happening. Frequently.
Steve