On 11/20/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
That looks like a different premise contributing to
our disagreement,
then, because I'd count that as "keeping" the article and therefore as
the merge vote being interpreted as "keep". A vote that wasn't
interpreted as either keep or delete would just be equivalent to a
"comment" or somesuch.
You're talking from a black and white point of view. I'm talking from
a greyscale (or perhaps even 24-bit colour) view. I say merge is
separate from keep. People who vote "merge" clearly don't mean
"keep", because otherwise *they'd have damn well said it*. So don't
appropriate votes to suit your point of view.
Worl, ideally,
if an admin closes '''merge''', she'd either
a) do the merge herself, or
b) tag both articles for merging
Perhaps that's too much effort, I dunno. I'm not an admin. I know I
haven't done very many merges off my own bat, too.
Ideally, sure, but I wouldn't necessarily consider this to be an
official part of "closing" the AfD. Merging articles is in the same
class of actions as fixing spellings or reorganizing paragraphs within a
page, a general editing task that doesn't require the sort of rigid
officialism that deletion has wound up needing. I've done plenty of
merges on my own when I stumble across pages that I think need it, and
ideally pages that needed merging would never be listed on AfD in the
first place since that's explicitly mentioned in the deletion guidelines
as something that doesn't warrant AfD.
On the contrary, I think it is entirely the closing admin's duty to
put the merge and mergefrom tages on the pages. It is only slightly
longer than doing a standard delete or keep, and clearly benefits the
encyclopaedia as a whole.
I agree that pages that need merging don't need AfD, but sometimes AfD
gives pages that need merging. Are you really going to take the
rules-lawyer approach and say that an AfD cannot give a merge
consensus? That is what you might call "rigid officialism".
--
Sam