Hi!
On Sun, Jun 26, 2016 at 4:01 PM, David Goodman dggenwp@gmail.com wrote:
I was the person who tagged the article we are discussing for deletion as no indication of importance.
Thank you for commenting here and for you work! I know it is a lot of work and that errors are possible. This is completely expected. I really appreciate all the admins and the work they are putting in.
This reduces the error rate to about 0.05 to 0.25%,and I cannot imagine how and crowd-sourced process could do better.
This sounds amazingly low! Great job!
The procedure worked in this case; I seem to have made one of my errors, and another editor caught it; the article was not deleted, but was sent to one of our two areas for further work on articles, the editor's user subpage
No, the article was deleted. And was restored later on to my user space after I got frustrated at first and then decided to retry the whole process and dive deeper into editing Wikipedia practices. I must say that this diving was interesting, that I learned many new things, and were welcomed by many very friendly and helpful people.
All too many articles go to user subpages or draft space and never get heard of again; more important, many potentially good editors whose material is challenged do not have enough confidence to complain or enough knowledge to complain effectively.
This would be for me a much better experience. If somebody would move it to a draft space and say, "hey, please improve it first, before putting it to the main namespace" I would completely understand the process. I did not know of this practice that people create articles first in draft spaces and then move them to main once they are deemed ready. I thought that I should just create an article which is missing and make it a stub so that it is clear that it is still in process.
But it got deleted in a day, without any discussion on its talk page, and I got lost access to its content. This made me confused as an editor who is not very familiar with processes.
In general I think this should be the practice. If something is not clearly illegal or something, then it should be moved to a draft space. And if not improved in a month or so, deleted. (The latter could probably be done automatically.)
Why is this not a common practice? I think it is a good compromise between deletion and experience of editors.
So where there are clear steps what steps should be taken to improve the thing I think this is great. For example, when the speedy deletion tag was added to my article, there was a clear next step: on the talk page start a discussion why it should not be deleted. I did that. But instead of expected discussion, article was just deleted. This confused me because I was not assuming I am doing anything wrong. I am going step by step as instructed.
If instead it would be moved to draft space and said, "the article is not yet to the standard of Wikipedia, it lacks clear statement of notability, you have a month to improve it afterwards it will be deleted" I would have known what to do, even without reading rules. And it would be also a very reasonable thing for me to observe.
I think the main issue with deletion is that it is a cut-off point, something where the flow of working on an article is abruptly cut and one cannot continue without asking for help. This requires a really high activation potential.
Articles on small organization, commercial and non-commercial, and on the people associated with them, are the ones most prone to advertising. I once also thought about dividing the site as a potential solution, but if we divided the site, the advertisers know very well the significance of having an article on WP, and would still want to be in the part where the most important articles go.
Exactly, but this is a good thing, no? So the editors who are not advertisers would be OK with articles being in the draft space until they are made to the good quality, and advertisers would not like that.
So why is this argument against moving articled to the draft space instead of just deleting them?
The only really effective way to rid us of promotionalism is to ban anonymous editing, and immediately reject any edits from people associated with the organization or found to be paid editors.
Hm, but I must say that this is slightly contradictory to the issue of notability and significance. Because one way to address the issue of promotionalism is to allow articles about corporations to exist, but be very bare and simple: there is this organization with this name, at this location, with this founders, it produces milk. The end. Not much space for PR. What is wrong with such an article? Maybe it is important only to that local community who would search for all companies producing milk in their area. Or students who would like to create a map of all companies producing milk in their area. Or maybe a professor wants to determine which milk company the school should go to for a trip and would like to see which are around.
In fact, the requirement for notability to me means that I have to create great statements about this company. Why it is important. Why it is the best. Why it should be included.
If, on the other hand, the article was plain and simple, this would be easier. And then later on those students can come to the Wikipedia article about a company they visited and add a photo of it to the article, and explain what they learned during the visit about the history of the company.
Mitar