From: Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com

I think that any article nominated for deletion should include reference to the applicable deletion criteria, otherwise the noms should be deleted as spurious.

I think that's a really bad idea. Who gets to decide which nominations get deleted? This is an open invitation to edit warring over AfD nominations. And legalistic wrangling. (The main effect it would have is that all nominators would soon learn to include the magic words "Article is not suitable for Wikipedia," which is an official "problem that may required deletion" according to the policy page).

The right thing to do when you see a spurious nomination is to point out that it is spurious and why. (In an ordinary text comment, of course. Big honkin' garish colored boxes don't add credence. Hypothetically, of course).

If your argument carries weight, it will influence other voters to vote "keep." This will have three effects. First, the article will be kept. Second, nominations that get a near unanimous string of five or six "keeps" don't waste much time because most people can see how things are going to go and won't bother commenting. Third, even if all the voters remain civil, such an occurrence is pretty embarrassing for the nominator and is likely to influence their future behavior. Much moreso than having their nomination vanish from the page with an edit comment like "I'm unilaterally deciding to keep this article because I happen to think the nomination was spurious."

Finally, yes, badly reasoned votes, or votes with no reason at all, are IMHO a problem, but I'm not at all convinced that there are enough spurious nominations to constitute a problem.

-- 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/