On 7/13/07, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote: It's yet another army-fantasy like project (think of countervandalism unit). But it's a good place where they can gather the terminal patients so we can go and help them die in peace instead of lenghtening their suffering instead of looking them by ourselves. Thank you for that

Steven Walling wrote: What heaping boatload of bad faith you guys are assuming. The described purpose of the project is not "keep everything at all costs!", it's "make things that might be deleted due to bad quality into things that will be kept due to good quality." It explicitly limits itself to topics where the _topic_ is a valid one to have an article on. Is this not a worthy goal?

G'day Ben, He makes a good point late in his post about the changing attitudes to inclusion/deletion: newbies are far more deletionist, and further, do so without any real clue of what they're talking about. I have become more inclusionist over time. However, the community --- by which I mean the squeaky wheels --- have moved much further back than I've moved forward, so that it now seems that I am massively out of step. I've noticed that a lot of the old-timers whom I respect have seen their attitudes shift similar amounts relative to "the community". There are plenty of crap articles out there in this wide, brown, wonderful encyclopaedia of ours about important topics. Unless these articles are improved, they will be deleted. It is a sad reflection on the Wikipedia community today that those who dare to write good articles are looked upon with suspicion. Wikipedia is not a project to write an encyclopaedia. It's a project to attack those of us who have the temerity to try to produce something worthwhile, in the name of "increasing quality". If you make an article better, then it can't be deleted ... and if you spend all your time here doing dodgy things like that, well, all that can be said is: we don't want your filthy kind here. Get out, you unconscionable bastard, before Steven and Pedro and the hundreds like them throw you out. -- Mark Gallagher "'Yes, sir,' said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend." - P G Wodehouse, /Carry On, Jeeves/

On 14/07/07, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: The AFD regulars have consistently held this to be far, far too onerous. I suspect there's some presumption of bad faith in there as well, because monitoring for crap does produce a bit of a siege mentality. (Remembering that most of what gets deleted really is *complete crap*. We're concerning ourselves on this thread with the false positives.) I shall try to be more flowery in my deletion summaries. I urge all those here who have not done so to go through [[Special:Newpages]]. Read one day's load of the thing, and remember that those are the articles that *survived*. THE HORROR. THE HORROR. As far as I can tell, the stage of trying to get one's way on Wikipedia by playing WikiNomic kicks in between three to nine months in. Some never get out of it. AFD has long been the site of WikiNomic trench warfare. We're talking Belgium early 1918 here. It is a very nice suggestion. Now to make it fly. - d.

On 7/17/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: I know wikipedia traditionally shuns automation, but this seems like a perfect candidate for it. Why not just send an automatic message to everyone who's ever edited the article at all? AfD people won't have to worry about sending a million notices, etc. Ben Yates Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com

Well, maybe just articles that don't have more than a certain number of contributors. On 7/18/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Ben Yates Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com

On 0, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> scribbled: Careful with that line of thought there! If you continue too far, you'll Godwin this thread. -- gwern Hackers Encryption ASWS W68 Espionage USDOJ NSA CIA S/

On 7/15/07, SJ <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote: The problem is identifying articles which have been deleted because of content, and articles which have been deleted because of the topic. Virtually all speedies fall under the former; PRODs lie somewhere in between; most AfDs deal with the latter. But even then, finding out why an article was deleted is something most admins are clearly too lazy to do. A lot of people being promoted these days seem to clearly lack clue. Johnleemk

On 14/07/07, Matthew Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote: Of course not. If it was prodded, *the policy explicitly says* it can be unmarked for deletion, or undeleted, if anyone objects. If it was speedied (correctly or incorrectly) it can be recreated. If what you end up with is still a deletion candidate, then it can be deleted again on its own merits, not for being a recreation... (I went three rounds over this with someone before - speedied in error, then every recreation speedied "per earlier"...) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Matthew Brown wrote: We are justified in being concerned about recreational deletion. ;-) Ec

Articles are not "uncontroversially encyclopedic" when they being brought up for deletion because of their lack of encyclopedic content or nature. A taskforce improving articles that don't have an AFD nomination would be more in line with your flawed vision of what the project constitutes. But when the project extensively mentions comabting what they see as unnecessary deletions in its intro and includes a direct link to AFD, then it's not a resource for improving articles that need help the most, but a project for making sure borderline articles get kept. That's inclusioism. On 7/13/07, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Ben Yates wrote: "Uncontroversially", says who? By definition, any article at AfD is having its suitability called into question simply by virtue of being nominated. If several people argue to delete, you can hardly say it's "uncontroversially encyclopedic".

"Unfortunately this is not always the case. AfD nominators are not perfect and are sometimes operating at least partly in ignorance about the subject of the article." So in other words, in urgin people to check every AFD, the project assumes good faith and poor judgement, intelligence (or both) on the part of all nominators. that's even better. On 7/13/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:

Excuse me for trying to encourage change. On 7/13/07, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Ben Yates Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com

On 7/13/07, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote: It's pretty important to recognize that community consensus is important, and that it gets delegated to subgroups for lack of perfect information and infinite time. So subcommunities often come up with rules of thumb and local guidelines which, when they become more important and are visited by more people -- or when they become more disruptive and no longer a niche part of the site -- inspire a shift in consensus. The observation that AfD regulars -- or more particularly *fD regulars for certain sub-deletion groups -- are not representative of the community as a whole has been true for a while, and community members who don't have the time or energy to fight about these things all the time, or who are eventualists and so let this slide, have been complaining for a while. SJ -- ++SJ

Steven Walling wrote: The project isn't urging people to check every AfD. We seem to be talking about two different proposals.

Steven Walling wrote: And encouraging users to check through AFD list is a bad thing because...?

On 7/14/07, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote: Imagine asking people to check an AFD!! Every prod and AFD is a direct statement of bad faith: all effort put into the article to date has been wasted, and the contributors were crazy for starting the article. It is hardly a novel concept that some people assume that the nominator is completely wrong until proven right. The default at AFD is keep, in theory. This is merely a stab in the dark based on my experience, but I think that only a third of Afd nominations are clearly correct, and they are usually closed within a day or two; many of these articles could have fallen under prod or CSD. A third of the nominations are about topics that are inappropriate or borderline, and serious thought is required by Afd participants. The rest of the nominations are unnecessary; the article topic and content are both clearly appropriate and could be rescued or merged into another article if only someone would assume good faith and try to build on what the contributors had been trying to achieve with the article. But that takes time. Rescuing one article could take one person an entire week, including trips to the library or even learning a little of a foreign language in order to verify some disputed facts. On 7/14/07, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote: As far as I can tell, the projects motto is more like "Lets put in a concerted effort where other people have demonstrated over a long period that they prefer to vote delete rather than spend four hours working on an article that is probably going to be deleted anyhow." Pretty noble intention if you ask me. The project has done nothing wrong so far; why try to sink it while it is still in the shipyard? -- John

On 7/13/07, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't see why the system should not need double checking. It's that kind of thing that keeps things honest & above board, in both directions. Deletions as unencyclopedic often at least have the potential to be flawed; for one thing, 'unencyclopedic' is simply a way of saying 'I want it deleted' in a long word. The average AFD process involves under a dozen people voting, most of whom are either "AFD regulars" or people involved with the article itself, positively or negatively. This seems like a very poor pool of people to be deciding what gets deleted in our vast project, doesn't it? I'm glad that you do. Myself, I have little faith in its results being predictable, repeatable, or indicative of very much at all. -Matt

On 14/07/07, SJ <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote: :-O :-D Brilliant! - d.

On 7/14/07, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gmail.com> wrote: Link? I remember a red haze of conflict, but not a specific suggestion; if there's one in place, perhaps we can just modify it a bit to make it a matter of separation and not confrontation (there is still room for an AfD with clearer purpose), and see how it works. SJ

On 7/14/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: Yeah, nice. I agree with the expedited cleanup. Sometimes there is dreadful crap that really needs to get off Wikipedia ASAP. Just because someone contests a PROD doesn't mean pure crap should be granted a 1 week reprieve, like that moron who decided to write a piece of crap article about beach chic to honor his bride (God help her), then contested the prod so the piece of crap would stay up for the week of his wedding. As much of an inclusionist as I am, compared to Guy certainly, there really is a lot of crap that gets a one week free ride, that I wouldn't mind seeing reduced to a 2 day free ride. KP

On 7/14/07, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote: Next time I see obvious schoolboy gaming then I'll bring it to your attention, as the beach chic thing was spit-in-your-face level. That's one issue about Wikipedia that I find leads to some of the biggest problems, imo, is that editors and admins won't stop and pause and think, "does this incidence need to be looked at independently?" Okay, the article gets a prod, and the creator objects, so it has to go to AfD. But, in this instance, editors should have looked at again at the article, the creator, the prod, and the protestation--at least for the dignity of the future bride in this case. It's part of what leads to name-calling (troll, whatever you want) and instant dismisal. An example of a case where I think some pause should be given was my request to have this remark deleted from the edit history of an article. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Prostitution&diff=next&ol… I really haven't seen much at this level on Wikipedia, and it seemed to me that something this vicious about another human being (she's apparently a dancer who has had a few spiffs on the Internet with other people) has no place on an encyclopedia. Apparently I'm wrong, and this is pretty typical Wikipedia stuff. I wish editors and administrators would pause a moment before issuing the old stand-by declaration that everything in the known universe is the same, which leads to things like successful schoolboy gaming of AfD, and successful abuse of Wikipedia for personal real-life battles. Is there really a place on Wikipedia for graffiti about your enemies? KP

On 7/15/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: There seems to be a lot of troll enabling at AfD AND a shocking number of accounts created to simply participate in one AfD. I keep stumbling over there and finding myself in a different cyber space than Wikipedia. In the meantime, getting some sort of funnel that keeps the obvious crap from being kept for 7 days would be good, or any system that says, "look you moron, you could hardly be lamer, let's be decent to you and erase all evidence of your loserhood," would be great. And what's with all the editors who tell me I can't clean up an article while it awaits the trash heap? If it's up for deletion, and it's going to be hanging around for another week as a certifiable piece of crap, the first thing I do is edit the article to the least offending version possible. If we create a funnel, let's make sure it gives no indication that the article has to stay looking like crap all the while it's up for deletion, whether 2 days, or 1 hour. I even edited 2 attack BLPs before I put the attack label on them. They were deleted in under 15 minutes, but no one needed an effortless view of the crap in those 15 minutes. Yes, funnel. KP

On 7/14/07, K P <kpbotany(a)gmail.com> wrote: You might not realize it but you have just accurately described most of what can be found in the daily image deletion categories, each of which is horribly backlogged. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:DailyDeletionCategories —C.W.

On Sun, 15 Jul 2007 13:38:49 -0700, SJ <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes. And the message to the contributor should be: thank you for contributing, we hope you will help us fix this article and in the process find out more about how we write and how we measure the quality of articles. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On 7/15/07, K P <kpbotany(a)gmail.com> wrote: if it's good crap, nothing else matters. I never liked the "COI" buzzword any more than the "notability" one. Overheard on Wikipedia (name the song and performer, be the sixth caller): But if you try telling that to the self-appointed "COI police" and yes, you will most certainly be called a troll (not that most of them would recognize the above quotation). —C.W.

On 7/15/07, K P <kpbotany(a)gmail.com> wrote: The same correlation could be drawn between happy-go-lucky vandals and the intense nimrods of the CVU or whatever it is now called. People need to relax! Of course that's what I'll still be saying when I create my top secret "counter-deletionism unit". —C.W.

SJ schreef: AfD really is about deletion: at least 75% (I don't know the exact percentage) of the articles brought to AfD are deleted. Naming it anything but "Votes for Deletion" misrepresents what is happening. That could lead to new contributors missing the point of the nomination, and that may lower the probability that the article is improved. (At least, that was an objection the last time this was proposed.) So the decision to delete an article or not is taken entirely at the "Articles for Review" page? See above about misleading page names. And what do you mean by "HOW"? There is only one way to delete an article: the "delete" tag at the top of the page. (Proposals to merge or redirect should not be brought to AfD, at the moment; those are just part of "normal editting") We already have that: [[Template:R with possibilities]]. Not a red link; people who want to know more about the subject will not click them, defeating the whole point of a redirect; and people who would want to create an article would arrive at an existing page... Perhaps a normal blue link, but one which ends up at an intermediate page? "We have no article about this subject, but we do have one on this related subject: [[.....]]. If you want to start a new article with this name, click [here]." That could be done without changing MediaWiki, of course. Eugene

On 7/14/07, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene(a)vanderpijll.nl> wrote: But it's not about improving the article. Oftentimes when I improve an article that has been up for deletion, the person who nominated it doesn't even notice the improvements, instead still proposing deletion based upon faults that have been corrected. The most recent time this happened the nominator did, when I pointed this out, go back and reread the article, agree it had been greatly improved, and removed the AfD tag. But, not until after he had responded to my vote for keep with a comment about how poorly written the article was, that showed he clearly was not watching improvements to the article. Articles nominated for deletion are often there simply because, for whatever reason, someone is trying to get them deleted. This is creating things like the guy who edited the page, then nominated it for deletion because it was missing what he edited out, nominating Rock Climbing and Society for Creative Anachronism for deletion, nominating things for deletion in an an area where the nominator knows nothing about the area. I keep thinking there must be a barnstar for most articles deleted that people are going after. I don't think that missing an opportunity for improvement is going to be an issue, because it seems that articles are being nominated by people who are not willing to see any improvement in the first place. KP

On 7/15/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: It may be worth considering that there are two general classes of articles which we often delete: 1. Subjects which might be worth writing about, but not the way the current article does so. A recent example I remember was the article [[Rendering water]]. (The article explained that rendering CGI water was "difficult", but said very little beyond that.) Allowing cleanup during AfD for these articles would often be helpful. 2. Subjects which should not have articles written about them, period. Many lists fall under this category (such as one that's currently up for AfD: [[List of movies broadcast by Nickelodeon]]), as well as a number of high-profile articles like [[Brian Peppers]]. No amount of cleanup will make such an article necessary or appropriate. Allowing AfD to distinguish better between these two classes might be of value. Currently, the closest we get to making a distinction is occasional closes "without prejudice against a [sourced/verifiable/comprehensible] article".

On 7/14/07, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene(a)vanderpijll.nl> wrote: You contradict yourself here -- yes, many articles brought to AfD are deleted, but you suggest that "the probability that the article is improved" is important; highlighting that AfD is not simply about "delete or keep" but about maintaining quality. And even the deleted articles should often not be deleted without any further action; catching up with the original authors, merging useful information from articles not notable enough to have their own keyword,The current formulation encourages the occasional bad faith discussion. But we don't need to speak in the abstract. Take some of today's AfD entries, for instance: they include [[Bubbles the Clown]], [[Katie Hopkins]], [[Chess strategy]] and [[Chess tactics]] -- all of which (even the first) are well written, contributed to by many people, well to very-well referenced or linked, and in the latter two cases have been around for five years. None of the AfD discussion about these articles had the subtlety of - considering original photos or illustrations created for them -- a PD photo of Ms. Hopkins, disgrams for the chess articles, an audio recording of the Bubbles article - considering the extent of the article's editing history and contributions - addressing discussions on their talk pages, some of which was about merging or POV; contacting WikiProjects committed to the articles that had templated their talk pages Instead, while noone claimed that these articles did not contain useful information that was carefully put together to inform an audience, the discussions take an oppositional tone: Delete v. Keep, pushing to persuade in a sentence or two, not to find ways to make the contributions of the existing authors useful. [It occurs to me that having such debates and not transcluding them onto the article talk pages points to a deeper problem. None of the four articles mentioned had a peep of the AfD thread on their talk pages...] A comment from the chess page AfDs: * Keep. If WP:NOT says this article should be deleted, WP:NOT is broken. JulesH 19:00, 15 July 2007 (UTC) ** It may be, but I dont think an AFD is the place to discuss changes to policy. Corpx 19:34, 15 July 2007 (UTC) Again, a reason these discussions should, in cases that are not claerly about 'how to delete', be active reviews, providing feedback to confused editors and broken policy as needed. You review an article that is causing someone trouble, to consider the best way to handle it. One possibility is deletion. if a review points to deletion, an AfD discussion might decide it should not be deleted after all -- this might be a more friendly version of DRV, carried out by people who care specifically about deletion and deletion policy, but while the article is still public for all to view its content and edit history. (NB: this could also remedy one of the troubles with DRV, pushing the abstract idea of policy/decision review to a more universal forum for [[Policy appeals]].) I elaborated a bit before. One of the purposes of an AfD discussion would be about whether that was in fact suitable; people at AfD presumably knowing the most about deletion policy and tips. Then the question is how to properly carry out the admin and style guidelines for deleting something. A meticulous process would notify the major authors of an article, and WikiProjects which are following it; looks for content in the article to merge -- this is no longer a part of 'normal editing' since once the closing admin carries out a deletion, normal editors cannot see content to merge it. Such a process could also check that any important talk-page sections and the deletion/review discussions are preserved, and cleans up any images or media that are orphaned as a result.... and it could offer contributing authors a way to get an archival copy of the article and its history for their records [since in the future it would both not be available to regular editors to view old permalinks, and not be exported in database dumps]. A crude process would delete article and talk page without further consideration. And an aggressive process would delete these, and work to prevent others from archiving copies of the text or edit history. These last options happen now on occasion with large, long-lived articles, and can be deeply offensive. As an example, consider the deletion (and removal of copies from user-space) of [[Wikipedia:Eleventy-billion pool]], something I wish had not happened. SJ

On 7/17/07, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene(a)vanderpijll.nl> wrote: We already put a small banner on the talk page with an AfD result. Making that banner a collapsible box (default-collapsed) and transcluding the discussion itself, would be a significant improvement.

On Sat, 14 Jul 2007 09:51:56 -0700, SJ <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes. But not a bureaucratic system, hopefully, just a way of saying "hey, this article has issues" and getting more eyes, maybe a fix, and finally if there is an obvious consensus that the topic is silly, remove it. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

Guy writes: I like this :-) It should go right below a quote about how "the art of writing an encyclopedia is deciding what to leave out" On 7/15/07, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes. Based on topic alone, one should be able to figure out which few articles are suitable for sending directly to an AfD discussion; if the topic could potentially have a good encyclopedic article, or a section or sentence in one, it should not go to AfD. If the topic might in itself be deletable - neologisms, OR, spam - then it could. Treating a 3-year-old 5000-word article the same way as a one-day one-paragraph article ---- the idea that the former could possible be eligible for speedy deletion, or that a 5-day deletion discussion without actively tracking down original authors is appropriate ---- is poor form. While we don't want the typical AfD process to be made longer, we need to have a very different, longer-timeframe process for figuring out how to be good stewards of information and history that has been part of Wikipedia for a while... even when changing standards suggest such material may no longer merit main-namespace keywords. ++SJ

On 7/15/07, William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> wrote: I couldn't write for Wikipedia without my squadron of copyedit stalkers. I love them all. KP