On 1/19/07, Nick Wilkins <nlwilkins(a)gmail.com> wrote: If the concept is in the sciences and the person is nominating it simply because they've never heard of it, how can they tell if the source is worthwhile? I didn't even know what to say to someone who nominated one article recently, on a subject the nominator had obviously never heard of, on the basis that the nominator questioned how sea levels could possibly rise if there was less water held in the ice caps, or maybe he/she was questioning the amount of the rise. I don't think having the nominator read the source would have helped much. On the other hand, it appears the article writer hadn't gotten anywhere near a source, either.... I'm finding a few problems with sources on articles. People don't realize you can't copy entire sentences from the article ("well, I only copied a few sentence, and never two in a row...."), and that you can't say the article said something it didn't. If the article said he started studying singing seriously at the age of 10, you can't say he started singing at 10. Maybe it's the Masson/New Yorker method of quoting in the latter case. How can anyone possibly nominate an article dealing with particle physics for deletion, thinking it is a hoax, if they know nothing about quantum mechanics? I personally thought quantum mechanics was a hoax until I studied it. I think if you know nothing about an area, you aren't qualified to decide to use time resources of other editors by nominating an AfD because YOU don't know anything about it. Why not just ask someone in the area? Need a geology editor, go to the geology page, look a bunch of edits and ask someone. But don't say, "I don't know anything about the subject, so I never heard of most of it, but really never heard of this, so I think it should be deleted." It's absurd and wastes time and resources. Race walking. Yeah, right. KP

On 1/19/07, Nick Wilkins <nlwilkins(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, the article did get improved, which it desperately needed. But AfD is so hostile, and the intention behind deletions is not to get them improved, and nominators tend to be extreme deletionists, even though there is no such thing as a deletionist. The whole area of deletions is just a cesspool of bad behaviour. Not always, or even most of the time, and, yes, one look at the new pages makes one think deletion should be an automatic default in any quest for quality, but aren't there more civil ways to go about it? On the other hand, if you see a crummy article, that you don't have enough knowledge to correct yourself, its owners will attack you for tagging it in need of clean-up. So, maybe you should just nominate crummy articles for deletion and other editors will fix them up? And how can someone in the know convince someone that something is an appropriate article in an encyclopedia againt the primary argument that "I was born after the Cold War and Lech Walesa is a nobody to me?" Sometimes what it may amount to "KP is always right, so don't require me to prove it...." KP

K P schreef: {{cite}} That's the second time you've claimed that this is common, and we haven't yet seen a single example. So I've checked today's AfD (just as I did last time), and of the 110 nominations so far, there were 0 because the nominator "had never heard of" the subject. Also, the phrase "never heard" occurs only three times on the page, and in none of those cases, it is the sole reason for deletion. I do not see it having any weight in deletion debates. (Where can I find the deletionist debates you're speaking of?) Eugene