Viajero wrote:
... Sometimes it really is better to wipe the slate clean and begin anew. ...
Yes - I agree. Jimbo really should take a look at the stuff added to VfD before making a decree that VfD should be abolished. Ideals are all fine and good, but it is us, not him, who are in the trenches. There is just too much crap added on a daily basis for us to fix it all. Sorry Jimbo.
But I agree that VfD should not be the primary solution for bad content and that Cleanup and its associated pages may not be used enough. However, most of what is added to Wikipedia daily is already fixed via the wiki process - /very/ little is actually removed or deleted. So maybe the lack of use of the Cleanup pages compared to VfD isn't really that big of an issue after all.
Nothing wrong with separating the wheat from the chaff. That doesn't necessarily mean deletion of a page, but if the page only contains chaff and no wheat ...
Sometimes an edit link is more informative.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Daniel Mayer wrote:
Yes - I agree. Jimbo really should take a look at the stuff added to VfD before making a decree that VfD should be abolished.
I'm not about to make any sort of decree, don't worry about that.
Erik suggested that the problems with VfD can only be resolved by me making a decision, or appointing someone to make a decision. But I have a slightly different view.
Nothing about VfD is Policy with a capital P, laid down or decreed by me. It's just a social custom, no more and no less. If the VfD process decides that an article like "Palestinian views on the peace process" should be redirected or deleted, there's absolutely nothing to prevent the next person who comes along from trumping the VfD process by just editing the page.
And if they do so in a positive, co-operative, and NPOV manner, then Wikipedia will be the stronger for it. If they do so in a negative, non-co-operative, and POV manner, then the Wiki process will work again -- the article will get re-deleted, re-redirected, etc.
--Jimbo
Jimmy-
Nothing about VfD is Policy with a capital P, laid down or decreed by me. It's just a social custom, no more and no less. If the VfD process decides that an article like "Palestinian views on the peace process" should be redirected or deleted, there's absolutely nothing to prevent the next person who comes along from trumping the VfD process by just editing the page.
And if they do so in a positive, co-operative, and NPOV manner, then Wikipedia will be the stronger for it. If they do so in a negative, non-co-operative, and POV manner, then the Wiki process will work again -- the article will get re-deleted, re-redirected, etc.
This doesn't sound like an encyclopedia to me - it sounds like a giant dumping ground where anyone who spends enough time to defend their space can keep it. It makes all the definitions of [[Wikipedia is not]] moot for people who are reasonably nice (or, more realistically, sufficiently persistent).
Without clear policies as to what material is allowed and what is not, and without clear means to enforce these policies (that is, a deletion policy), Wikipedia will develop into an Everything2-ish state. Thus you eventually end up *needing* a Sifter project because Wikipedia will be so full of crap that nobody takes it seriously. I prefer a model wherein there are only articles which have at least the *potential* to be brilliant prose. And when I say, "we have X articles", I would prefer not to have to follow this up with increasingly cumbersome estimates as to how many of these *really* qualify as articles.
Although you have in effect made a clarification that you think VfD is not policy, this clarification is still buried somewhere in a mailing list archive and will likely not be referred to by persistent trolls to justify their crapflooding. (That's good!) Without such a declaration being directly inserted into the respective pages, your view is also unrealistic, however: Sysops treat VfD as policy. Users are told by sysops that VfD is policy. Sysops *will* call for bans of users who try to circumvent VfD. We even have a page called Wikipedia:Deletion *policy*.
So now you've made a bad situation worse: 1) VfD doesn't have a clearly defined process 2) VfD is treated by other pages and by sysops as policy 3) Jimbo says that VfD isn't policy
The potential edit wars and long-term conflicts that can result from this fuzzy state make my head hurt. I know you value creative anarchy and consensus building, but I think you also have to come to terms with the reality that an encyclopedia requires clear rules that are actually enforced to work. NPOV is such a policy, and I do not see a single good reason why we shouldn't have a similarly strongly enforced inclusion policy.
Regards,
Erik
On Jan 10, 2004, at 3:56 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
So now you've made a bad situation worse:
- VfD doesn't have a clearly defined process
- VfD is treated by other pages and by sysops as policy
- Jimbo says that VfD isn't policy
Actually, he said VfD isn't Policy, with an explicit capital P. I assume there's a significant distinction, though it's unclear to me. It may resolve the above quandary. Jimbo?
Peter
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