Lir wrote: I often find that many of the deletionists endorse and use this "policy":
If an article is not up-to-date, NPOV, well-written, long enough, or sufficiently accurate; then, it should be deleted. It is up to those who vote "keep"; to render this article to a "proper" level of quality; otherwise, it will be deleted.
I think a statement by Jimbo, if he agrees, that it is up to the deletionists to improve articles (rather than >deleting them) will be somewhat useful for the non-deletionists. I am tired of seeing articles listed for >deletion, simply because somebody thinks it "sucks"; I am tired of being threatened, "You either improve >this article within the week; OR, we are gonna kill it!"
I think an increasing use of deletion is a natural response to the growth in wikipedia, which as it takes shape as a serious encyclopedia, has evolving boundaries and an envolving concept of what it is all about. Things that were crap were tolerated in the hope that /someday/ their saviour would come and rescue them and make them encyclopedic. But the higher the standards achieved now as wikipedia grows, the more articles once tolerated as passable (ie not hideously bad, just bad) fall off the edge and are seen as simply not good enough. So growing deletion of substandard articles is a natural part of the evolution of wikipedia from early draft encyclopedia to real attempt to create a real encyclopedic text.
Given all that, I do think deletion has for some users become a first response, not the last, which it should be. All too many articles are being put on wikipedia's VfD page because /one/ person has a problem with them or doesn't know anything about them. (A classic example was the proposed deletion of an article on a famous one-time winner of the World Snooker championships, someone known to millions worldwide but simply not known to Americans, therefore thought of as not warranting a page. Though to be fair, the proposer of this ludicrous deletion did realise from the laughter of the rest of the world that he had made a mistake. Not all proposers of loopy deletions accept that they made a mistake and crusade to delete perfectly fine articles simply because /they/ don't accept the article.
The Cunctator's idea that if one person opposed a deletion it should be stopped is farcical. Wikipedia does have a few people whose contribution to debates are 'whatever everyone else wants, I oppose just to be different'. If someone wrote an article [[Adolf Hitler was a nun]] the same small group would be out on the barricades defending it just to be different. They see wikipedia as some sort of game to wage extremist agendas, whether political, ideological or analytical. The rules being followed where high-threshholds are required for deletion (2/3 etc) are sensible and don't allow the 'watch me cause trouble' brigade to force wikipedia to keep nutty, absurd ridiculous articles, often through false names being created to allow multiple votes.
As to the victims of 9/11, there is not one iota of justification for keeping these articles on wikipedia. What happened on 9/11 was horrible, disgusting and outrageous, but wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a shrine. The US suffered a horrible experience but so have many nations and peoples have had just as horrific experiences, many indeed far far worse (the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Vietnam, the Hundred Years War, two World Wars, etc). Articles based on the Irish War of Independence that covered individuals murdered by the British or the IRA, ('Mickey O'Brien was a good man and father'; 'Sir Laurence O'Keeffe was a kind employer and father', etc) would deservedly be binned. America's traumatic experiences in /one/ series of incidents, which by world standards has a relatively small death toll, cannot be given 'special' treatment no matter how emotionally traumatic the impact on the US and its psyche. This is a world encyclopedia, not an American one, and cannot treat the life of one US victim as more worthy of attention than a Palestinian victim, an Israeli victim, a Holocaust victim, an Irish victim, a British victim, a Somali victim, a Chilean victim, etc. These pages give the impression that US victims are somehow /more important/ and in a special league to every other.
JT
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On 11/6/03 5:08 PM, "James Duffy" jtdire@hotmail.com wrote:
The Cunctator's idea that if one person opposed a deletion it should be stopped is farcical. Wikipedia does have a few people whose contribution to debates are 'whatever everyone else wants, I oppose just to be different'. If someone wrote an article [[Adolf Hitler was a nun]] the same small group would be out on the barricades defending it just to be different. They see wikipedia as some sort of game to wage extremist agendas, whether political, ideological or analytical. The rules being followed where high-threshholds are required for deletion (2/3 etc) are sensible and don't allow the 'watch me cause trouble' brigade to force wikipedia to keep nutty, absurd ridiculous articles, often through false names being created to allow multiple votes.
The straw man arguments are farcical. I don't consider unreasonable objections to be valid. I do have a wider definition of what I consider reasonable (when it comes to inclusion) than you do.
As to the victims of 9/11, there is not one iota of justification for keeping these articles on wikipedia. What happened on 9/11 was horrible, disgusting and outrageous, but wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a shrine. The US suffered a horrible experience but so have many nations and peoples have had just as horrific experiences, many indeed far far worse (the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Vietnam, the Hundred Years War, two World Wars, etc). Articles based on the Irish War of Independence that covered individuals murdered by the British or the IRA, ('Mickey O'Brien was a good man and father'; 'Sir Laurence O'Keeffe was a kind employer and father', etc) would deservedly be binned.
Again, a straw man argument: your examples violate NPOV.
America's traumatic experiences in /one/ series of incidents, which by world standards has a relatively small death toll, cannot be given 'special' treatment no matter how emotionally traumatic the impact on the US and its psyche. This is a world encyclopedia, not an American one, and cannot treat the life of one US victim as more worthy of attention than a Palestinian victim, an Israeli victim, a Holocaust victim, an Irish victim, a British victim, a Somali victim, a Chilean victim, etc. These pages give the impression that US victims are somehow /more important/ and in a special league to every other.
Again, this is the "some people put so much work into carefully researching the reports on the lives of the people killed that day and creating entries for them, and we can't be bothered to do the same for other people who have been killed, so we should delete all the entries" argument.
Why should it be up to the "deletionists", as you choose to call those of us who use and value VfD, to improve garbage which is garbage to begin with and will always be garbage? Please tell me how to improve [[Tsesungunille]], an article about a place that the original author made up. Or [[Old Granny Sweat Weed ]], which no one can find any source to prove that it actually exists, except for the source cited in the article, which no one can find either. Or [[Disappearing hoagies]], which is supposedly about sandwiches disappearing from the parking lot during Philadelphia Eagles games. Or [[Abek]], about the supposed colonization of Brazil by Basques, which no one can verify. Or [[The mode of production of free software ]], which is the Marxist theory of free software. If we are ordered to improve these articles, I'd love to know how.
I'm also sick and tired of being ridiculed about the snooker guy. At the time I placed it on VfD, the article consisted of "Born 1949. A snooker champion. He turned professional in 1971. He drank and smoked during tournaments helping sponsored tobacco advertising. Today he is better known for his throat cancer and a stand against tobacco industry." Please tell me how I'm supposed to know that this is a meaningful article about an important person, based upon this information?
RickK
James Duffy jtdire@hotmail.com wrote:
I think a statement by Jimbo, if he agrees, that it is up to the deletionists to improve articles (rather than >deleting them) will be somewhat useful for the non-deletionists. I am tired of seeing articles listed for >deletion, simply because somebody thinks it "sucks"; I am tired of being threatened, "You either improve >this article within the week; OR, we are gonna kill it!"
(A classic example was the proposed deletion of an article on a famous one-time winner of the World Snooker championships, someone known to millions worldwide but simply not known to Americans, therefore thought of as not warranting a page. Though to be fair, the proposer of this ludicrous deletion did realise from the laughter of the rest of the world that he had made a mistake. Not all proposers of loopy deletions accept that they made a mistake and crusade to delete perfectly fine articles simply because /they/ don't accept the article.
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Rick wrote:
Why should it be up to the "deletionists", as you choose to call those of us who use and value VfD, to improve garbage which is garbage to begin with and will always be garbage? Please tell me how to improve [[Tsesungunille]], an article about a place that the original author made up. Or [[Old Granny Sweat Weed ]], which no one can find any source to prove that it actually exists, except for the source cited in the article, which no one can find either. Or [[Disappearing hoagies]], which is supposedly about sandwiches disappearing from the parking lot during Philadelphia Eagles games. Or [[Abek]], about the supposed colonization of Brazil by Basques, which no one can verify. Or [[The mode of production of free software ]], which is the Marxist theory of free software. If we are ordered to improve these articles, I'd love to know how.
If you redir them all to a dead end, no reader will ever see them again. If after a lengthy period of time the redir hasn't been touched, just delete, no muss, no fuss. If someone wants to defend the original text, they can do it on the redir's talk page, have edit wars, debate the nature of an encyclopedia, and it doesn't have to be in everybody's face all day.
I'm also sick and tired of being ridiculed about the snooker guy. At the time I placed it on VfD, the article consisted of "Born 1949. A snooker champion. He turned professional in 1971. He drank and smoked during tournaments helping sponsored tobacco advertising. Today he is better known for his throat cancer and a stand against tobacco industry." Please tell me how I'm supposed to know that this is a meaningful article about an important person, based upon this information?
I didn't know about this episode! If that had happened to me, I would have shut up about deletion forever afterwards... It's a perfect demonstration that the process needs changes, and koan-like, people should keep bringing it up until you achieve enlightenment. :-)
Stan
RickK
James Duffy jtdire@hotmail.com wrote:
I think a statement by Jimbo, if he agrees, that it is up to the deletionists to improve articles (rather than >deleting them) will be somewhat useful for the non-deletionists. I am tired of seeing articles listed for >deletion, simply because somebody thinks it "sucks"; I am tired of being threatened, "You either improve >this article within the week; OR, we are gonna kill it!"
(A classic example was the proposed deletion of an article on a famous one-time winner of the World Snooker championships, someone known to millions worldwide but simply not known to Americans, therefore thought of as not warranting a page. Though to be fair, the proposer of this ludicrous deletion did realise from the laughter of the rest of the world that he had made a mistake. Not all proposers of loopy deletions accept that they made a mistake and crusade to delete perfectly fine articles simply because /they/ don't accept the article.
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RickK wrote: I'm also sick and tired of being ridiculed about the snooker guy. At the time I placed it on VfD, the article consisted of "Born 1949. A snooker champion. He turned professional in 1971. He drank and smoked during tournaments helping sponsored tobacco advertising. Today he is better known for his throat cancer and a stand against tobacco industry." Please tell me how I'm supposed to know that this is a meaningful article about an important person, based upon this information? If people bring this up (and I haven't seen it brought up since when it was current on VfD, so unless you get private mails about this, you're being hyper defensive here) it's because it showed you as someone unwilling to even do the most cursory research before recommending deletion. For one thing, the article himself said the guy was a professional player in a sport, and a champion. That alone probably makes him important to keep. A quick Google would have told you more.
-Matt (User:Morven)
Rick wrote:
Please tell me how to improve [[Tsesungunille]], an article about a place that the original author made up.
This one fails the 'confirmability' test anyway, so it isn't a good example.
Or [[Old Granny Sweat Weed ]] ... Or [[Disappearing hoagies]] ... Or [[Abek]] ... Or [[The mode of production of free software ]],
As far as I can tell, these all fail the 'confirmability' test, and so they aren't at issue in the current discussion.
Remember, the debate is primarily between two factions (though of course there are surely many subtle positions within these two factions). And neither faction is saying that nothing can ever ever ever be deleted no matter what.
Confirmability is an important safeguard accepted by most or all completionists. Hand-entry (as opposed to mass import) is an important safeguard accepted by most or all completionists.
Straw man examples don't really help us to clarify the discussion.
Q. "Should I mass-import 20,000,000 census entries then?" A. "Mass-importing is a different issue, which short circuits an important safeguard against trivia"
Q. "What about things that aren't confirmable at all?" A. "Delete them. That's not what we're talking about."
Now, I think that *even after* we remove those two categories from the discussion, we *still* have legitimate arguments on both side. I'm firmly in the completionist camp rather than deletionist camp, but I do accept that other views _which don't engage in straw man argument_ have some good points that we should consider.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Q. "Should I mass-import 20,000,000 census entries then?" A. "Mass-importing is a different issue, which short circuits an important safeguard against trivia"
I disagree with this. There is absolutely _no_ difference between mass-importing thousands of articles and a person sitting down for weeks mass-importing thousands of articles. The only check the latter imposes is "someone has to have too much free time to do this", which is not much of a check at all: there's all sorts of crazy things people are willing to spend time on that are quite trivial. And there's all sorts of important things people aren't willing to spend time on.
To pick a relevant example, I'd consider any of the six million people who died in the Holocaust more encyclopedia-worthy than the ~3k that died in the WTC attacks. The fact that there are people with enough spare time to mass-import the latter doesn't change this fact.
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Q. "Should I mass-import 20,000,000 census entries then?" A. "Mass-importing is a different issue, which short circuits an important safeguard against trivia"
I disagree with this. There is absolutely _no_ difference between mass-importing thousands of articles and a person sitting down for weeks mass-importing thousands of articles.
I don't think you wrote what you meant to write here. I think that mass-imports should be held to a higher standard than hand-written entries. I think I get the gist of what you were trying to say, though.
The only check the latter imposes is "someone has to have too much free time to do this", which is not much of a check at all: there's all sorts of crazy things people are willing to spend time on that are quite trivial.
Tell you what: when someone shows up and starts _hand_ writing thousands of articles on random topics, we'll deal with it. If they refuse to stop doing it, we might even decide to ban them.
But until someone actually does that, I don't even see why we should talk about it.
You're making the argument that since someday, some lonely person might have enough freetime to waste typing in thousands and thousands of entries in the manner of a robot, we have to delete any and every article that's too trivial today.
I think that are some missing steps in that deduction, so that the conclusion does not follow from the premises.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Tell you what: when someone shows up and starts _hand_ writing thousands of articles on random topics, we'll deal with it. If they refuse to stop doing it, we might even decide to ban them.
But until someone actually does that, I don't even see why we should talk about it.
You're making the argument that since someday, some lonely person might have enough freetime to waste typing in thousands and thousands of entries in the manner of a robot, we have to delete any and every article that's too trivial today.
I think that are some missing steps in that deduction, so that the conclusion does not follow from the premises.
Ah, but it has happened: a group of people have decided to add literally hundreds of pages on victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. My worry is that if we allow this, there is nothing to stop literally millions of other pages from being eventually added. There are, for example, quite a few groups interested in preserving the memories of those who died in the Holocaust; I don't consider it unlikely that at some point some of them will discover Wikipedia and begin a concerted effort to add at least thousands of biographies of people who have nothing particularly notable except "died in the Holocaust" filled with perhaps paragraphs of detail of exactly where they were born, place of death, etc. If we allow this sort of thing to go on for Sept. 11, we have no good reason to protest when it starts happening for other tragedies in which lots of people died--and it _will_ happen, especially as Wikipedia gets more high-profile.
My downplaying of the bot/person distinction is that, in the case of a group of people concertedly adding articles, it already functions essentially like a bot in that the rest of us cannot keep up with them and fix them as they come in. This is already plainly visible with the Sept. 11 entries, as [[Antonio Alvarado]], an all-caps eulogy still not fixed after 18 months, aptly illustrates. It'd be even more obvious if there were a group of, say, 100 people adding Holocaust biographies; I don't think that'd be any better than a bot doing it, and potentially worse (as the formatting and article quality would be less consistent).
-Mark
Why should we ban them, if they're only adding articles that inclusionists insist should be added?
RickK
Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote: Tell you what: when someone shows up and starts _hand_ writing thousands of articles on random topics, we'll deal with it. If they refuse to stop doing it, we might even decide to ban them.
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This discussion seems to be getting slightly off track.
There already is a incremental improvement in the way new articles are dealt with: the Cleanup page. I've listed stubs there which I would have voted to delete on VfD, and, much to my surprise, I've seen them blossom into passable articles. By first listing substandard articles on Cleanup with a brief comment for a week or two seems like a far more positive and constructive approach than immediately "voting" on their deletion.
As an aside, I'll add that a fair number of new stubby articles can profitably be merged into existing articles. It seems that many new users are more inclined to start a new article than add to existing one.
V.
From: Delirium
To pick a relevant example, I'd consider any of the six million people who died in the Holocaust more encyclopedia-worthy than the ~3k that died in the WTC attacks. The fact that there are people with enough spare time to mass-import the latter doesn't change this fact.
Noone ever mass imported any entries on the people who died in the WTC attacks.
I don't understand why it's necessary to attack anyone who disagrees with you by saying that their arguments are straw men. By doing so, you belittle the other person and make any attempt at conciliation impossible.
These are NOT straw men. These are items which are currently on VfD, which it has been proposed, should not be deleted, under any circumstances.
RickK
Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote: Rick wrote:
Please tell me how to improve [[Tsesungunille]], an article about a place that the original author made up.
This one fails the 'confirmability' test anyway, so it isn't a good example.
Or [[Old Granny Sweat Weed ]] ... Or [[Disappearing hoagies]] ... Or [[Abek]] ... Or [[The mode of production of free software ]],
As far as I can tell, these all fail the 'confirmability' test, and so they aren't at issue in the current discussion.
Remember, the debate is primarily between two factions (though of course there are surely many subtle positions within these two factions). And neither faction is saying that nothing can ever ever ever be deleted no matter what.
Confirmability is an important safeguard accepted by most or all completionists. Hand-entry (as opposed to mass import) is an important safeguard accepted by most or all completionists.
Straw man examples don't really help us to clarify the discussion.
Q. "Should I mass-import 20,000,000 census entries then?" A. "Mass-importing is a different issue, which short circuits an important safeguard against trivia"
Q. "What about things that aren't confirmable at all?" A. "Delete them. That's not what we're talking about."
Now, I think that *even after* we remove those two categories from the discussion, we *still* have legitimate arguments on both side. I'm firmly in the completionist camp rather than deletionist camp, but I do accept that other views _which don't engage in straw man argument_ have some good points that we should consider.
--Jimbo
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