Despite the objections raised from time to time about this, I fail to see the issue. I think it boils down to the generic mistrust of all administrators that certain people who are not administrators seem to harbour.
I've been a contributer to the wiki for five years and an admin for three or four. I object to this sort of behavor, and it has nothing to do with "generic mistrust of all administrators". In fact, I'm surprised you would use this sort of blind labling as an argument. Frankly, it's more than a little insulting. And even if you don't think it is insulting, did you think this sort of comment would be helpful? You're simply dismissing the problem and blaming other people's mental states for even suggesting that there IS a problem. Have you ever tried this with your girlfriend? In my experience, it's not terribly constructive.
We need to focus on why these things happen -- and they happen a lot, I've been involved in three just this week alone. Consider a fairly typically pattern that I have seen repeated (literally) hundreds of times...
1) a new editor writes up an article
2) someone comes and drive-by tags the article, for arguments sake, let's say a prod
3A) there is a _significant_ chance that the original editor will be unaware of this. In my experience, the vast majority of new editors are unaware of the watchlist, and the HUGE majority of tagging is not indicated on the user's talk page 3B) the editor does become aware of this, but is given little or no information on what to do 3C) the editor is aware, attempts to find out what to do, and still can't figure it out
4) the article is deleted, because the user didn't do "the right thing"
Throughout this very typical pattern. And to date most of the people in this thread can't even see that this is a problem. The only answer is "well you failed to do X, so that means it falls under rule M64g, so we deleted it". How does that help? Do you think that the user is any more aware of what happened after this "explaination" than before? Did it help them avoid such problems in the future? Did it improve the wikipedia? No, no and no.
Let's get more specific. After I saw the post here I started to check out what had happened. Here is the history...
FN wrote and edited the article someone drive-by tagged it with notability tag. a form-tag was also left on FN's talk page FN replied to the tag, not realizing A) the tagger would likely not see it, and B) what to do about it FN visits the page, and notices that the tag has a comment on how to use {{holdon}} FN adds a {{holdon}}, following the only instructions he has been given the admin comes along and deletes the article anyway. no comment is left anywhere
So then _I_ tried to see what he would have had to go through to "properly respond" to the problem. The first thing I did was try to find the notability guidelines. Due to the wiki's laughable search engine, this was not exactly trivial. Then I tried reading the guidelines, which were legalistic gobblygook. After _several_minutes_ I convinced myself the article did in fact meet the guidelines. Then I tried to find out what the proper response was. I failed, utterly.
Now look back over this thread. How many posts in this thread actually attempted to help FN? How many explained the policy and why it exists? How many gave him instructions, or even a link, on how to avoid these problems in the future? Is there even one post that is remotely helpful for this new user?
Is this the sort of thing that we expect to put our users through? It certainly seems that way, because every "pro" vote to date has complained about the terrible onus on the admins. No one seemed to worry about the terrible onus on the users. Did anyone stop to consider that the wikipedia is built for the users, not the admins?
I can't think of any way of doing so that wouldn't result in the queue of attack pages and pure vandalism awaiting deletion frequently stretching into the thousands, rather than the hundreds we have now.
Specious argument. We're talking about notability, not attack pages.
One can imagine a two-person rule; the first administrator to come across a speedyable article can't delete it, they can only tag it, and then they have to wait for *another* admiinistrator to agree with them and do the actual deletion.
Did you even bother to look at the history and delete logs? I suspect not, because if you had you would be aware that _two_people_were_involved_. Someone named Betaeleven (a self-declared deletionist) tagged it, with no comment of course, not even in the checkin log. It appears they did so after simply following FN's contributions list (see the history). Two days later, after FN added the {{holdon}}, the admin Nihonjoe deleted it anyway.
I particularily liked the suggestion that FN could have put a {{holdon}} on the article, because that simply illustrates just how deep this lazyness goes. We're having a thread about lazy admining, and many of the people offering suggestions can't be bothered to even find out what actually happened? It's enough to drive one mental.
It all boils down to this: there IS a problem. The problem is lazy admining and slavish attention to the letter of the law when doing so. If one good article gets deleted by mistake as a result, that's a problem. And it's not one, its hundreds.
Ok, here's my suggestions:
In cases where tagging may result in an article, or significant portions of it, being removed for reasons other than vandalism or similar, the tagger must:
1) place a note on the editor's talk page saying the article has been tagged 2) place a note (NOT templated) on the article talk page explaining what the problem is. "failed notability" is not good enough
Any tags placed that fail to meet these can be summarily deleted. If they are not removed, at the admin's leisure, they are _not_actionable_ until someone DOES meet these criterion or does remove them. Additionally, incorrect tags, prods on NPOV or notability for instance, should be summarily removed. These would fix the vast majority of cases I come across.
Maury
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