[WikiEN-l] On the effects of sowing dragon's teeth

[Tony Sidaway]

JAY JG said:
>
>
> The reason it is hard to delete school articles is two-fold;
> 1) Wikipedia deletion rules are stacked in favour of inclusion; at
> least  two-thirds of voters (and often more) must vote to delete for it
> to happen,  and votes to re-direct  are interpreted as "keep", though
> the obvious intent  is that the article should not stand on its own.


When I close, I usually go for 75-80%, depends how confident I am about
the presence of socks and the like.

> 2) School inclusionists are now organized, and have set up a
> "Schoolwatch"  page to ensure that all schools are kept.  These people
> vote to keep every  single school, usually with cut and paste comments.
>  Thus a group of a dozen  or so inclusionists can easily force
> Wikipedia to keep every single school  article, no matter how silly,
> uninformative, trivial or unverifiable they  are.  And, in fact, that's
> exactly what they do.  However, whether these  dozen people represent
> the consensus of Wikipedia is another question.
>


I think the group of inclusionists you describe may well exist.  I think
it is more than likely that, like me, they have been influenced by a
perception that there exists a campaign to delete school articles and to
use VfD, as David Gerard has put it, or the purpose of quality control. 
In my case the perception arose from the actions following the closing of
an article on Mahajana School with a keep decision.  The school was
inexplicably redirected to the Erode article and then speedy deleted.  It
was restored following a long discussion on votes for undeletion, but then
relisted for deletion again very soon after.

More recently, the robotic listing for deletion of over 50 schools in the
space of 3 days did nothing to dispel my impression that a deletion
campaign was under way.  I can find no other explanation for carrying out
such a procedure on that timescale.

That kind of activity does tend to attract attention.  The kind of people
who are most likely to do something about it rather than just shrug it off
tend to be those who, like me, don't like what they see happening.  It may
also cause some people, like me, to rethink their attitude towards 
deletion.  It tends to radicalize people.

So yes, there's something in what you say.  But there is also some truth
to the old story about sowing dragon's teeth.