On 9/16/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Dan Grey wrote:
On 15/09/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Count the number of articles that go up to AFD every day, and ask yourself if you think its reasonable that everyone write a paragraph
- or even a short explanation - on everything they vote for. Simply
*voting* on everything would take an hour a day at least.
Just to be clear, Ryan Delaney wrote that, not me.
I meant to respond to Ryan on this. As a AfD closer, I do expect all participants in the debate to spend a few minutes, or whatever it takes, reading the article, and then read the other comments in the debate, and have a bit of a poke around the subject, possibly look at the article history. If they're not doing at least the first two of those, they're not making an informed comment. If I see them write a few words in the context of the debate, I'm happier that there has been an informed discussion.
This evening I was privileged to spend two hours closing a discussion on the proposed deletion of a minor book on a controversial subject. About fifty people participated, so it took me a long time to perform my customary backfground checks on the contributors. Debate was good-natured, given the inflammatory subject matter, and the sense of serious engagement I got from that debate made it a pleasure.
Had everybody just typed "keep/delete" there would have been two effects: one or two people who originally voted redirect would not have changed their votes to delete and redirect; three people would not have been convinced by points and facts raised in the discussion and changed their vote from keep to delete.
In short, it would not have been a *debate*.
I could have closed it in half the time (especially since there would have been fewer radical edits towards the end by people who thought the discussion was getting out of hand). But it would not have been right.