Preliminary Deletion's voting has closed; alas, a consensus was unobtainable, although some have been making effort arguing that a consensus is not necessary, as a 2:1 majority in favour of the proposal was achieved. I take no sides in this debate. However, I have taken the leisure of rewriting the proposal to include a suggestion of anthony's, and answers to nine questions/objections. I have also merged a popular suggestion with the proposal itself, albeit cutting out a lot of fluff.

I hope I can get quite a few people from the mailing list to go over the proposal again, because I fervently believe we need to do something about VFD before collapses under its own weight. I wanted to address people's objections, I really did, but I can see no conceivable way to do so without alienating yet another sizeable segment of Wikipedia. People want less bureaucracy, but they don't want to give admins a free rein. So what do we do? Let users delete and recreate articles freely? Imagine the delete wars! I think it's very sad that about half of the objections couldn't be addressed with more than a list of points about why they cannot be handled. I'm quite unhappy that we can't have our cake and eat it too, but I'm even more unhappy that it seems quite a bit of people think we can.

Some others seem to have voted against the proposal without giving a reason beyond that "it's bad", so I could not address their objections, whatever they may be.

In closing, I beg some of the wiser and not-so-wiser ones reading this list to read (or reread) [[Wikipedia:Preliminary Deletion]] and engage in discussion about it; we need all the suggestions we can get. If we could still somehow grasp that elusive cake from our stomachs and yet obtain full nutitrional benefit...

John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])