[WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

[Bryan Derksen]

geni wrote:

>On 10/17/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>  
>
>>At the time of this writing en has 776,230 articles. By definition, the
>>articles we're talking about are generally not "popular" - there are
>>only a few people interested in them one way or another. It's very easy
>>to overlook an AfD in all that for a five-day period, I managed to miss
>>the entire existence of the "The Jar" article from its creation through
>>to its deletion over a much longer period than that.
>>    
>>
>You relise the logical end point of that is that wikipedia has grown
>beyond our ability to manage it and needs drasticaly downsizeing? Even
>the most extream deletionists would probably feel that that was going
>a little far.
>  
>
You've interpreted my position to be exactly the opposite of what I was 
aiming for. I'm not saying "Wikipedia is big, so we should be shrinking 
it to make it easier to manage with our current methods". I'm saying 
"Wikipedia is big, so we should be changing our methods of managing it 
to cope with that."

>>Bit of a topic shift there. The template namespace is very different
>>from the article namespace and is not addressed by AfD. There's TfD for
>>that, with its own separate set of criteria for template deletion.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>I was refuring too the human habit of minimising expenditure of
>energy. Under the suggested changes we would end up with an impressive
>number of templates for voteing on  AFD
>  
>
Oh, I see, this is in reference to your idea to explain votes using 
templates such as {{nn}} instead of just typing "nn". Well, I didn't 
propose that and in fact I think it would be a bad idea. So I guess 
we're in agreement here, for different reasons.

>>Redirects can be changed. This is kind of a side-issue, though, specific
>>to this one particular article.
>>    
>>
>
>No you have already admited that not many people would care. What
>makes you think the redirects would be changed?
>  
>
I'm not sure what the problem here is, though. This is Wikipedia, the 
whole point is that the readers are also editors and so when they spot a 
problem they can fix it. If I follow a redirect and it takes me to the 
wrong place, I go back and change it. If nobody ever follows the 
redirect it won't get changed but it also won't _matter._

I edit plenty of articles about whose subjects I care nothing, BTW. The 
random article link is my browser's home URL and I click it whenever I'm 
bored with whatever else I was doing. Eventually someone else like me 
would stumble across trouble spots even if nobody really cared about them.

>ADF/[[wikipeida:wikiproject decency]] going on for thirty days? You do
>know that dissrupting wikipedia is a blokerble offence.
>  
>
I figured I was going to be accused of violating WP:POINT at some point 
in the course of this discussion. I was expecting that I'd have to 
actually make a related edit on Wikipedia itself before it happened, 
though, rather than just proposing an idea for a policy change.

>I don't regard nn as useless so I have no problem with them amounting
>to the same thing.
>  
>
Voting just "nn" gives no reasoning _why_ the voter thought the article 
was nn. The point of AfD is supposed to be to have a discussion and 
reach a consensus, not just tally up votes and go with whichever side 
achieves the magic numeric threshold. If an article were to go up for 
deletion and fifty people voted "keep, notable!" but one person voted 
"delete, this is a hoax. See these websites [1][2][3], it was dreamed up 
by a radio shock jock in 2003 at WKRAP in New Serepta as part of a 
contest he was running." I would certainly hope that that one 
well-support delete vote would blow all fifty of those unsupported keeps 
out of the water.