On 07/01/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: My understanding was that even admins should tag, if there's anything there that's at all subjective (anything much above page-blanked-by-author, random text, whatever). It certainly seems more sensible that way. (I usually try to, but...) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 1/7/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well, yes they can. But Andrew's point still stands. How can one make a well-balanced decision when you're tagging or deleting stuff every 20-30 seconds? It usually takes me at least 2 minutes to read the entry, watch the history and do other related stuff and that's just on a short article. Also, the reasons given in the reason field by some administrators is totally not as helpful as it should be. Mgm

geni wrote: Observations: The tag went up on this article less than one-half hour after the article was begun. It's also remarkable that no-one involved has seen fit to comment on the admin's talk page to question his excessive zeal. Ec

20 seconds is actually quite a bit of time if you take into account some types of speedies (broken redirects, redirects to user pages, talk pages without articles, some completely NN band articles, total nonsense, etc.) An average of one delete every 20-30 seconds, over the course of an hour and working from the usually-backlogged CSD page, doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Erica en:User:Fang Aili

On 07/01/07, Royalguard11 <royalguard11(a)gmail.com> wrote: Perhaps I should provide some context to my original mutterings. The case that drew my attention a little while back did so because it had been tagged as {{db-empty}}, and then deleted despite containing a {{hangon}} note, three external links, and 160 words of actual honest-to-god coherent content. It was a little patchy, clearly written by someone for whom English was not a first language and wiki-syntax was not a second, but obviously a survivable stub on something and certainly not an empty article. And the guy who wrote it complained it had been deleted, so I looked into it. Deletion summary was "(Deleting page - reason was: "Empty page" using NPWatcher)" It's an automatically generated edit summary (parsing the db tag?), and I find it hard to credit anyone actually looked at that page as it was being deleted. In that one-hour run of 182 semiautomated deletions, the admin in question removed a grand total of four deletion tags. 2% is somewhere very far south of our usual falsely-labelled rate, by my reckoning; certainly whenever I look at CSD more than one in fifty is a dodgy or spurious deletion request. There are cases of clear-cut deletion, sure. And there are many more that aren't. This sort of robotic script-assisted deletion is mindless; the reason we don't have it performed by a robot is to have human judgement in the loop. There are malicious requests; there are mistaken requests; there are confused requests; there are all sorts of cruft sneak in there, and we can't just glance at it, see there is indeed a tag, and hope the tagger got it right. If we didn't need that human judgement, we'd have coded a ten-line script and given it admin rights. I'm not naming names; I'm not pointing fingers; I'm trying to make this as general a cry as possible. But I've done my time on the coalface as well as you have, and I know what these routine tasks entail. And there are clearly cases where the availability of easy automation is making people lose track of their common sense and their goals. We give people adminship because they are sane, because they are trusted to be able to think and to do the sensible rational thing when a problem arises. We don't give them it because they can fulfil a Stakhanovite quota of meaningless routine tasks faster and better than anyone else. I am not demanding extra bureaucracy in a process; I am not demanding extra process. I am not pretending I know better than "the admins"; I am one. But it's a wiki. The cases where we need to ACT NOW ACT FAST are few and far between; if there's a backlog, well, there's a backlog; it'll clear. We can always take more time over something; we set the pace of this project ourselves. We should not be pressurising ourselves into running ahead of our own common sense. It's an encyclopedia, not a race. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Thomas Dalton wrote: If the case is as it is described, there should be no need for DRV. Just undelete it. The tag was clearly incorrect.