Actually, ed has pissed me off about as often and thoroughly as he was able, and I ''still'' say he did the right thing here, and has nothing to apologise for. VfD deserves deletion, and I seem to remember Jimbo considering deleting it himself about a year ago. The '''worst''' aspect of the wiki is its "wiki-democracy", and all its ugly manifestations. The majority has no claim to the truth, esp. when its a majority of those who happen to know about some obscure vote, failing to announce it to anyone other than their partisan cronies. Jack (Sam Spade)

Delirium (delirium(a)hackish.org) [050804 06:01]: I sincerely believe the current VFD process and culture is so poisonous to Wikipedia that, at least for the moment, we would be better just letting the disks fill with band vanity, original research and poo jokes. I strongly agree we need a deletion mechanism - no-one's who's done Special:Newpages patrol could possibly disagree IMO. And over 95% of what hits VFD needs a sudden and painful death. But VFD as it exists is sick and diseased and a powerful net negative. - d.

On 8/4/05, neil klopfenstein <rebrane(a)gmail.com> wrote: Someone could tag an article {{vanity}}, for example, and an admin could delete it on sight, just like articles tagged {{delete}}, as long as it was clearly a vanity page. The ambiguous ones (and there are relatively few of those) could be shuffled off elsewhere, and dealt with on an individual basis. I like that idea. -- Stephen Bain stephen.bain(a)gmail.com

Where are the inclusionists in this discussion? Silly me, I was worried that simply placing a tag on an article for the next admin to delete violates the recent consensus ''against'' such an increase in speedy deletion? Not to mention all the stubs and articles sure to be lost in such a maelstrom of deletion? That said, I don't think were too far off from a good idea ;) Jack (Sam Spade)

I don't know if this is a totally acceptable choice. Some articles are simply not appropriate for the encyclopedia (borderline spam comes to mind, and articles with an inherent POV also could be used as an example). Keeping inappropriate blank articles would seem almost as an endorsement that we want the subject material in Wikipedia. Also, wouldn't these articles artificially inflate the total article count? Ben/Bratsche On 8/5/05, Dan Grey <dangrey(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Bratsche-It means "viola!"

That would make sense, I think. But we'd have to keep those articles out of disambig pages. Think of the confusion someone would have if they clicked on a person's name, and ended up on [[WP:VAIN]]? A category for these pages would help, too, in case someone wanted to improve some to a point past a pure vanity article. Ben/Bratsche On 8/5/05, Phroziac <phroziac(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Bratsche-It means "viola!"

I agree, if it gets searched for theres a good chance it belongs here. Oh, and i meant that message got sent to BEN, not dan. hah. On 8/5/05, Dan Grey <dangrey(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- signature

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005, Stephen Bain wrote: You've just described how the present works -- in theory. Vanity pages, spam, articles with negligible content all get listed as Speedy Delete. The rest go to VfD. VfD will always be a contentious forum, if for no other reason than we are discussing whether to knife someone's baby; in effect, a vote to delete an article can be perceived by its original contributor as a criticism that their work is "unimportant." Add to that the diverse philosophies present on Wikipedia, & that the size of the Wikipedia community has grown to the point where cliques or factions have begun to emerge, & Wikipedia has come to the point where VfD will always be a hotly controversial topic unless we agree to accept all articles that do not meet the criteria of a Speedy Delete -- in effect, removing it entirely. Although it wouldn't help to streamline the process for actually deleting an article; last time I looked at the instructions, I found them so intimidating that I gave up & went back to just contributing material. Geoff

JAY JG (jayjg(a)hotmail.com) [050804 06:42]: The other 5% is making it a truly poisonous source of acrimony in the Wikipedia-writing community. IMO. See further up the thread. - d.

Sure, its a ''bad'' baby ;) Jack (Sam Spade)

David Gerard wrote: It seemed to work well enough for the 8-10 months I was actively involved in voting/discussing/closing entries there. There were still complaints, but mostly from "inclusionists" who disliked it simply because it was a venue for deleting articles. Is it significantly worse now, or just scales badly, or have the inclusionists simply gotten louder voices? I must confess I haven't messed with it in 6 months or so just because I lost interest in most meta-pages and went back to writing articles. =] -Mark

On 04/08/05, Matt Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote: I used to read every VfD entry, though I'd only comment on a handful. That'd be pretty much a full-time job, now, an hour or so a day at least... it's hard to get the time to do that and anything else. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 04/08/05, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: Some numbers: 31/07 - 102 30/07 - 121 29/07 - 137 28/07 - 130 27/07 - 130 26/07 - 132 25/07 - 108 ie, 860 over a week at the end of July, versus 31/01 - 58 30/01 - 69 29/01 - 76 28/01 - 67 (one of which I remember, sigh) 27/01 - 65 26/01 - 69 25/01 - 63 at the end of January, a mere 468. Numbers don't included cases where many pages were listed together (there was one last week with over 20!), but I suspect they scale to the rest of VfD - so almost doubling in six months? It's trickier to get numbers for a year ago, so I won't try it now, but I'd guess at maybe 250/week? In a few months, the day-at-a-glance VfD page will get to the length it was a year before, week-at-a-glance... when it was already straining. Leaving aside the inherent problems of the VfD process, there's an obvious scaling issue there. The recent WP:CSD expansions will stem the tide a bit - a lot of VfDs are "playing safe nominations" of speedy candidates anyway, but... I have absolutely no idea what to do about it, so I'm glad someone seems to have enough suggestions to get a debate going :-) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: RIPEMD160 Phroziac wrote: Several people use combinations of Javascript and CSS which allow this to be done. With one click they can hide all closed VFDs. - -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \

On 8/4/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote: Remember the good old days when the whole of VfD fit on one page? -- Stephen Bain stephen.bain(a)gmail.com

The entire idea of "voting for deletion" seems problematic to me. It's like a reverse popularity contest -- the worst of grade-school elections. "Discuss for deletion", "Nominate for deletion", "Propose for deletion", --whatever. But a rough and informal polling system seems to be the root of the difficulties. ...But I don't have an alternative. FF On 8/3/05, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

On 03/08/05, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: I agree (but the disks would never fill - see m:Wiki is not paper). Ed deleted VfD then someone else undeleted it. Hardly a big deal. In the process he hit everyone right between the eyes with the fact that VfD isn't great. Moving forwards though, there only appears to be only two schools of thought: 1. Those who wish VfD to stay as-is with all discussions about listings held in one place. 2. Those who think everything to do with an article should be discussed on that article's talk page (and a list of pages under discussion could be maintained with ease using a m:DynamicPageList, which we all kinds of places on Wikinews). The former allows very much the same people to contribute to each VfD vote, with some 'interesting' concepts (eg. "notability", seemingly never defined). This could, I feel, be the root of the problems David and Ed are highlighting presently, the same ones that many have done so before. The second would make it harder for the same groups of people to contribute to each VfD vote. It could quite possibly reduce it to only the contributors to the article and those who have in interest in the topic (picking up the discussion via the DPL). VfD itself could easily be deleted again and no. 2 put in its place within minutes of the devs turning the DPL extension on on Wikipedia. Should we though? Dan