I'm all for reevaluating how VfD works, but I'd like to oppose the name "Editorial Review."
Not only does it sound Nupedia-ish, but I have a strange image of a salon with leather chairs, Ivy League professors smoking cigars and sipping cognac while deciding the fate of articles from commonfolk. The name "votes for deletion" makes the barrier high, meaning an article stays unless you put yourself on the record for endorsing a destructive act.
This may come as a surprise to those who've found me a "deletionist", but I think adopting the "Editorial Review" moniker makes Wikipedia less wiki-like. It makes Wikipedia sound really stuffy and formal, which it really is NOT.
-Andrew
On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 03:27:44 +0200, Elisabeth Bauer elian@djini.de wrote:
dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
E.g. (GROSSLY caricaturing an actual VfD debate for purposes of illustration) instead of saying "I've never heard of Lehman Brothers, what do you know about them?" a nominator is more likely to say something like "Vanity, some non-notable insurance company, delete spam." Typically there will be a more comments like that until someone with _some_ topic familiarity runs across the VfD entry. THEN someone chimes in "The firm is really quite large, unless I'm very much mistaken." Then there are follow- ups "It's a Fortune 500 company," "Definite keep," "Keep article on major financial force of the twentieth century," "Need more articles like this," etc.
thanks for this summary ;-) the same happens on de: in the same style. We even have a page for this kind of stuff: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ELKE (is an acronym for Extreme Loeschkandidating ("Vfding") Excess Points) where people can assign scores.
Everybody understands the concept of submitting an article for review and possibly having it be rejected. If newcomers perceive Wikiprocess as a variation of that model, fewer of them will be unnecessarily shocked or offended by the VfD process.
I think it's a rather good idea. Recently on de: we also thought about creating a page where newbies can submit their articles for a general review (help with formatting, encyclopedic style etc.) since some new people asked for something like this.
greetings, elian
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