On 9/16/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Usually the content of deletable articles isn't needed to create a nice article/stub. If it is, temp undeletion or history undeletion requests can be placed.
I've got some sympathy with that point of view. However I didn't have to search long to find that list of power ballads case. That was a case where deletion didn't make much sense; it just seems to have been a result of failure of imagination on the part of those involved in the debate. As a regular closer, I'd say this probably happens a lot more than you think.
Although I don't agree with everything Kelly says on the subject of AfD, and I am actually one of AfD's greatest cheerleaders, there is a strong tendency for people to congregate there whose views seem to be untempered by any knowledge of deletion policy. For them "if in doubt, don't delete" sounds like inclusionist claptrap rather than an accurate quote from the deletion policy. For them, the lists of "Problems that don't require deletion" and "Problems that may require deletion" might as well not exist. They'll ask for deletion because an article is a mess, or because the content has POV problems, or because it's deteriorated but was once good, or because the subject does not merit an article (for which the remedy is of course a merge) . There is a serious problem here, and saying "well we don't really need that content, we can always rewrite it/temp undelete it/whatever" isn't really an adequate defense for what is often a quite shocking miscarriage of deletion policy.