Re Apocs comments. My experience has been that while there are overenthusiastic speedy deletion taggers out there, most of them are quite receptive to a bit of guidance. Unfortunately and perhaps due to our ongoing shortage of admins there isn't enough of that feedback being given, and poor speedy deletion tagging has derailed several RFAs this year ("Good vandal fighter" has long ceased to be enough on its own to get someone through an RFA, especially if there is perceived to be a flaw elsewhere).
But as for "What do you do if their deletion tagging is no more accurate than picking new articles at random?" I haven't encountered new page patrollers whose tagging is anywhere near that bad. Quite a few of the articles that I decline as speedy deletions subsequently get deleted at AFD, as though the article claims importance the subject is not notable. Other common mistakes that I've noticed include tagging attack pages as biographies lacking a claim to importance or significance, and tagging pages as no-context when a smidgen of work can salvage them.
Defaulting to minor edits is also something that nowadays can damage an RFA, it certainly didn't help my first one. But unlike some faults most RFA !voters are open to a candidate who responds by changing their default; again I doubt that enough admins or experienced editors are taking the time to point this out to people making that mistake before their RFA.
WereSpielChequers
Message: 10 Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:02:11 +0100 From: Surreptitiousness surreptitious.wikipedian@googlemail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie and not-so-newbie biting To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 4AB75D33.8010703@googlemail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Apoc 2400 wrote:
A question for the admins here: When you come across an article wrongly tagged for speedy deletinon or prod, do you check up on the user who tagged it? What do you do if their deletion tagging is no more accurate than picking new articles at random?
When I tackled NPP and prods I used to follow up on this, but after a while I noticed it didn't make much difference. I also noticed such users would pass RFA's quite easily because of all the people who would support them based on their awesome work "fighting" vandals. I burnt out fairly quickly I'm afraid on these tasks. I'm trying to find a new way of shaping people's behaviour on Wikipedia such that it is better in keeping with the spirit of WP:CIVIL. There was one user I used to nag repeatedly to turn off the minor edit check-box to no avail, which I found incredibly frustrating. I think after a while you develop an instinct about people who will be good Wikipedians and those that won't, but it is incredibly hard to try and generate debate on those issues. User RFC's are next to useless, I mean, could you imagine an RFC on a user who refused to mark their edits, no matter how contentious, as anything other than minor? It's seen as something rather trivial.
The issues we discuss in this thread go deep, but here is one change that would help a lot:
- Articles should not be tagged for deletion two minutes after creation for
not asserting notability. Yes there is {{Hangon}} but how would a newcomer know about that, and why should they? Of course an article created a minute ago is being actively worked on. If it's not time critical (attack pages, copyvios) no tagging should happen the first hour. If this is technically difficult then NPP should be modified.
Personally I'd like to see deletion rolled back further, such that stuff that was neutral and verifiable and wasn't obvious spam just be kept. Let every company that has ever existed have an entry, no matter how brief. If it is verifiable, where's the issue. An argument can be mounted that we are failing to adopt a neutral point of view by excluding some businesses over others. If you have a short stub which merely states the line of business and the date of establishment, you've given due weight and you've gone some way to informing a curious reader, further than a red link does.