[WikiEN-l] I better shut up (was vfd RFC)

[neil klopfenstein]

On 8/3/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Delirium (delirium at hackish.org) [050804 06:01]:
> 
> > The problem with the proposals to do away with it is that none so far
> > has proposed anything better (or at least people haven't been convinced
> > the alternative proposals are better).  There is plenty of stuff that
> > goes through VfD that ought to be deleted; only a small percentage of
> > the stuff on VfD is contentious in any way.
> 
> 
> I sincerely believe the current VFD process and culture is so poisonous to
> Wikipedia that, at least for the moment, we would be better just letting
> the disks fill with band vanity, original research and poo jokes.

I tend to agree. We have all the time in the world to remove crap from
Wikipedia. I think that paying too much attention to deleting things
at this early stage is a mistake.

> > If VfD is done away with and no alternative deletion process is
> > provided, then those types of pages will simply be speedy-deleted.  In
> > itself that would be fine, since the majority are obvious, but having a
> > VfD process helps sometimes IMO, because occasionally an admin will
> > mis-identify something as an obvious deletion candidate when it really
> > shouldn't be, and others will point out his error before the page is
> > actually deleted.
> 
> I strongly agree we need a deletion mechanism - no-one's who's done
> Special:Newpages patrol could possibly disagree IMO. And over 95% of what
> hits VFD needs a sudden and painful death.
> 
> But VFD as it exists is sick and diseased and a powerful net negative.

The worst thing about VfD, in my opinion, is that once an article is
listed, it "can't" be merged/redirected/whatever else. It seems like
the majority of the articles on VfD are either no-brainer speedies or
no-brainer merges.

My idea for a comprehensive VfD reform: create a 'problem article' tag
which replaces {{vfd}} and {{d}}. Admins can delete these articles if
they're problematic, editors can remove the tag if they substantially
rewrite the article or redirect it. Anything that keeps the problem
article tag for a week gets deleted.

I also think that vanity pages should be redirected to [[WP:VAIN]] and
band pages, maybe, to [[WP:MUSIC]]. We could easily set up a way for
these redirects to be batch-deleted once a month.

Comments? Recommendations of which talk page to put this on? (I've
never made a policy proposal before...)

e.
[[User:Rebrane]]