On 6/19/06, Cobb <sealclubbingfun(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
The problem is, I think, that lots of people who
comment here don't actually
take part in AFD.
They don't see the day-to-day crap... they just see a system that keeps
struggling along
despite being hopelessly broken and unscalable. AFD is such a demented
system that
it's very often less hassle to just ignore rubbish than even try to get it
deleted. No doubt
certain inclusionist factions on Wikipedia rather like things that way, and
claim it is a
self-regulating mechanism rather than a system that cannot cope and which
people
avoid.
I greatly disagree. Though I've not been very active in the last few
weeks, AFD in the time I've been on Wikipedia (last year, roughly) has
made the right decision most of the time, and looking at the various
nominations, the vast majority are pretty uncontroversial.
AFD is fine for dealing with noncontroversial deletions. So is Prod,
but any lone individual can de-Prod legitimately, so AFD is a fair
fallback for that.
AFD is a clunky mechanism for dealing with contentious deletions. But
even in those cases, it seems to largely work out ok in the end.
Contentious deletions would be helped, in my opinion, if the
nominators had gone through the policy steps of marking bad articles
for cleanup, attempting to get them cleaned up, etc prior to AFDing
them. People argue less about things which were listed for cleanup
for a month or two and nobody bothered to salvage.
--
-george william herbert
gherbert(a)retro.com / george.herbert(a)gmail.com