[WikiEN-l] VfD is broken

[Chris Wood]

- Yes, this is a rant, but please bear with me... it becomes less rant-like
;)

    See also the recent thread "Dartmouth follies".

Votes for deletion have gone through the roof. At the start of August, the
average number of pages voted for deletion per day was two. Now it is
somewhere between 25 and 30, and I see no reason to expect this to stop
increasing.

Most of the articles are listed there for the wrong reasons. For instance,
someone sees a badly written article - they list it on vfd. This page is
useless without major expansion - vfd. A topic I've never heard of, and
think is obscure - vfd.

Articles are often voted for with little or no reason. Here's an example:
"Simply not notable enough, I'm afraid."

So what? As an example, one page being VfDed at the moment is about a club
established in 1888, with many thousands of members (don't look for it, this
is just an example). Why should the votes of 7 deletionists matter more than
the thousands of people who may potentially look up the article? For that
matter, why should the votes of even 100 Wikipedians matter, if the article
is likely to be looked up by many people?

The inherent bias of this page towards deletionism has been previously
discussed on this list.

It's pretty clear that VfD is going beyond it's original purpose, is wasting
a lot of time for no good reason, and in many cases conflicts with other
principles of Wikipedia. For instance, stubs are being deleted just because
they are stubs, even though they are very expandable.

I think it is clear that we need some tighter guidelines on reasons why
something should be voted for deletion. I've originated a policy,
Wikipedia:Importance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Importance),
which attempts to establish some, and isn't doomed to failure like the
previous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Fame_and_importance.
Feel free to disagree with me, comment (*not* vote) and propose changes etc.
at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia talk:Importance.

I'm not so much trying to push my personal viewpoint here, as trying to
establish consensus and stop people wasting their time. If the community
decides "no articles about obscure topics", that's fine, but let's make that
policy and not argue about it in a hundred different places over and over
again. Let's not waste people's time by encouraging them to start articles
on the one hand, and on the other deleting them because some other people
think they're not important. Let's establish some common ground, and stop
driving people away.

--
Chris Wood