On 12/10/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 12/10/05, John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
How do you deal with crap everyone agrees should be deleted, but is not actually speediable? Here's a thought - make it speediable!
Anthony
Are you kidding? A year ago, the paranoid community rejected two different measures for something *in between* speedy deletion and AFD (both involved admin discretion but not full reliance on it). What makes you think anything will have changed this year?
I *don't* think anything will have changed. I said was talking about what we *should* do, not what's going to happen. If everyone agrees something should be deleted, we should delete it, period. Running it through some AFD process first is not smart.
And how are you going to determine whether everyone agrees? Without a central place, the only way to find out if a discussion is going is by running across it on RC or in a watchlist, which you could miss if you happen to not be online when it happens.
That said, if we turned off AFD, I think the number of speediable categories would quickly grow.
Plus, in my opinion, Jimbo has set us into a new era of experimentation on Wikipedia. We no longer need consensus before we can at least try something out. Don't you think the paranoid community would have rejected a proposal to disallow users that weren't logged in from creating new articles? I certainly do, in fact if you want consensus I don't even think the community would accept such a proposal now (maybe it'd get a majority, I really don't know).
Jimbo is our benevolent dictator. He can do things because he's the boss. If Jimbo decrees something that doesn't mean the rest of us should stop looking for concensus.
If people won't trust admins to semi-speedy something, why would they trust them to speedy something?
I don't understand that question at all. Why should the votes of a few non-admins and a few admins override the consensus of all admins? If all admins insist on keeping something deleted, then there's nothing that can be done about it.
If anything, considering how we've grown, I wouldn't be surprised if people would vote down proposals like Preliminary Deletion even harder. People are scared of the potential for admin abuse. And frankly, I don't blame them.
As long as the ability to delete remains possible, the potential for admin abuse is very small. What is the potential abuse here? GNAA gets deleted? I actually doubt it would.
You know what, forget the AFD experiment. Let's give admins free reign over deletion for one week. Surely they won't vandalise Wikipedia to the point where we can't fix things after the week is up. After one week, we look at what got deleted, and we see if there was any admin abuse, and if so how severe it was.
AFD is still there, but it's there for actual disputes. Preferably it's there mainly for discussion about the underlying issues of what should and shouldn't be deleted, and doesn't get bogged down in minutiae of every single article (in some especially heated cases maybe there will be a vote over a single article, but not hundreds a day). AFD doesn't get it right perfectly 100% of the time. There's no reason admins need to either. As long as there aren't gross violations of the standards which we reach *through consensus*, it really doesn't matter.
How can you determine if there is a dispute at the moment you nominate something? If it's not yet deleted, it needs to be discussed (AFD is a debate). If it is deleted in error you go to DRV.
We'll probably wind up with somewhat more deletions this way, and really I see that as a bad thing. But as AFD has pretty much completely abandoned the notion of consensus anyway, it's probably inevitable.