[WikiEN-l] Rampant Deletionism

[Ray Saintonge]

Rick wrote:

> Why can't you just indicate on VfD why you think the article is valid? 
>
Because it requires us to spend time at VfD when we could be doing 
something useful.  The most useful contributors are busy contributing. 
 Hurrying them to improve the article in question within seven days 
means they have to take time away from what they do best.  If they are 
interested in the subject matter they'll deal with it according to their 
own timetables, and not when some deletionist tells them to.

Some of us like to consider our votes carefully.  If it takes five 
minutes each to consider each of a dozen articles that might appear on 
VfD on a given day that's an hour of time spent just deciding on votes, 
and the article itself is still unchanged.  Even when the result of a 
vote is unquestionably in favour of deletion, and the article is 
deleted, we are no further ahead; we're just back at the point where we 
were before that article was written.  

We are all limited in the amount of time that we can contribute. 
 Consider even some of our most severe edit wars, and I would suggest 
that at any given time the number of people directly involved is fairly 
small.

If somebody who is considering an article to be added to VfD instead 
took 15 minutes to half an hour researching and improving that article, 
it would save everybody's time, and Wikipedia would end up with a 
something rather than a nothing.

Ec