Hello, I propose a new VfD system which uses Scientific Management principles as described by Taylor, the creator of Scientific Management: (don't take it too seriously!) The rules of the new system are: 1. When a Wikipedian proposes to delete a page and the community says "NO" (as defined in Article 7), he or she will be charged with an amount of X Wikis from his WikiBank account. (PUNISHMENT) 2. When a Wikipedian proposes to delete a page and the community says "YES" (as defined in Article 7), he or she will earn an amount of X Wikis, added to his or her WikiBank account. (REWARD) 3. When a Wikipedian proposes to delete a page and the community is "UNDECIDED" or "NEUTRAL" (as defined in Article 7), no change will occur to his or her WikiBank account. 4. Only users with at least X Wikis on their WikiBank account will be able to vote for deletion. However, there will be an allowed overdraft of Y Wikis on all WikiBank accounts. The user will be required to pay the overdraft in a period of Z months by creating new articles or fixing existing ones or providing another service to the community. 5. Usual voters' WikiBank accounts will not be affected. The punishment or reward will affect only the Wikipedian who proposed a page to be deleted. 6. (intentionally left blank without any rational reason). :) 7. Definition of the Community's Will: When a P percentage of the voters say "YES", the Community Will is considered to be "YES". When a P percentage of the voters say "NO", the Community Will is considered to be "NO". When there are no votes at all, the Community Will is considered to be "NEUTRAL". In any other case the Community Will is "UNDECIDED". 8. The real value of the variables X, Y, Z and P will be defined by Jimbo, unless he nominates another person or group to define these values. The definition will be added to this rule-list as Article 9. :) 9. (Intentionally left blank for future use.) 10. A vote is: 10a. Positive if the Wikipedian wrote "DELETE!". 10b. Negative if the Wikipedian wrote "KEEP!". 10c. In all other cases it is a comment, not a vote, even if the Wikipedian meant a positive or negative vote by using other words. 10d. The "!" and the capital letters are included in the definition of a vote. i.e. "delete!", "delete" and "DELETE!" are considered different. :) note: currently a P percentage of 2/3 is discussed on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy The main idea of the proposed system is to PUNISH wikipedians who vote to delete a useful page and REWARD wikipedians who help keeping Wikipedia clean and usable by voting to delete unnecessary or harmful pages. People will think twice before voting to delete a page which may seen as useful by others, but at the same time they will have a (wiki-monetary) incentive to vote the deletion of pages which surely will not yield negative votes, thus keeping Wikipedia clean, usable and safe for its readers. Background information: For the definition of a "Wiki": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikimoney For the definition a "WikiBank Account": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiMoney_accounts For what VfD is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion The goal of VFD is to prevent trolls and vandals from destroying Wikipedia and keep it clean, usable and safe for its readers. Our readers are our masters and we must serve them at the best of our ability. We should never allow vandals to put gargabe, false information (which, especially in cases about Health or Law, may be dangerous), potentially offensive material etc. VFD should exist but not overused. Currently it is overused, since most of the pages listed in VfD could have been listed in Cleanup or Pages Needing Attention. My (serious) recommendation is that anyone who likes to use VFD should read and have a deep understanding of Ahimsa and WikiLove. See: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikipediAhimsa and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLove VFD is often destructive and contrary to Ahimsa. Ahimsa is non-violence. However, Cleanup and Pages Needing Attention are in harmony with the Ahimsa principles. It is better first to use Cleanup and Pages Needing Attention before using VFD. VFD forces people to write either only good articles or no articles at all. It uses the power of Fear to control people's inclusion of stubs (small articles) and gargage in Wikipedia. Using fear is psychological violence, so it is against Ahimsa. In the end, VFD may be useful (keeping Wikipedia clean), but VFD's means are based on Violence. Of course I accept that it is impossible or very difficult not to use Violence, provided the current state of society and human spirit. It is sure that if we had unlimited time, we would delete all Wikipedia articles in the end, because everyone will find some soft or hard objection to any of the existing articles. (this is an interesting "infinite time experiment", isn't it?). Even the best and most NPOV article may be seen as offensive by some people. And it is known that in the human society, a lot of mad persons found great support among the people. If you can't think of any example, just open a History textbook or browse Wikipedia for historical figures and you will find many crazy trolls who were able to influence the society in order to materialize their craziness. Thank you, With Best Wishes for Peace Profound, --Optim --- Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote: __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! 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On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Delirium wrote: [snip] > So I disagree; I think VfD is working perfectly fine. Do those who > think otherwise actually read and participate in it (The Cunctator > excepted, because I know he does)? Speaking as one who hasn't been part of this discussion, I haven't taken part in VfD for quite a while because I found it difficult to get my 2 cents in (I frequently have the page changed on me while I'm trying to edit over a dial-up connection), the conversations move too quickly for me to check in only once or twice a day, & putting this page on my watchlist is of little use. Participating in the forum at [[Wikipedia:Cleanup]] at least allows me to help keep some of the potential candidates for VfD from appearing there. It's not only the newbies who find the wrangling over form & content confusing &/or off-putting. Geoff

Jimmy Wales wrote: I hereby propose a new, semi-automated tagging (in contrast to voting!) system: * All logged-in users (yep, my favourite phrase!) get a "tag this article" link for each article, leading to a "set tag" special page * Tags can be set for many things: copyright problem, NPOV problem, brilliant prose, stub, etc. * There's a "YES/NO" rabio button, so one can say "that's no copy vio" * A comment can be added, one per user per article. If a user changes his/her mind, the old comment is overwritten. * Special pages can be created from this information: ** Brilliant prose pages (sorted by number of tags) ** NPOV/copyright problem pages (sorted by date of first entry and number of tags) ** etc. * Some of this information can be displayed on the article page as well ("This article is considered [[brilliant prose]]") I suggest to create a new "article tag" table in the database for that purpose, once we're back on the monster server. Magnus