On 8/3/05, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
Delirium (delirium(a)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]]