On Sep 20, 2005, at 1:31 PM, Tony Sidaway wrote:
But AfD is already swamped by growth and this will only get worse. Correcting its strong exclusionist bias and restoring its connection with the deletion policy would not solve its fundamental brokenness.
I agree wholeheartedly. Among other things, I think deletion policy is always going to have to be adaptive, because, like the blocking policy, stupid will always find new and previously unimagined ways to exist. Ultimately, the deletion policy, like the blocking policy, amounts to endless iterations of "Stop things that hurt Wikipedia without preventing anything beneficial to Wikipedia." Which is to say, we cannot sensibly connect the deletion policy to anything as a set of rigid rules, because all that will obtain is a system designed to be gamed.
AfD has two deeply seated problems.
1) It is unmanageably big, and will only get bigger. 2) The case for deletion can usually be made with a cursory look at the article. The case for inclusion often requires mildly substantive research using non-Wikipedia sources. Thus deletion is always going to be a fundamentally easier case to argue.
Thus it will always be the case that AfD becomes unmanageable, and that the unmanageability affects the exclusionists noticably less than the inclusionists.
-Snowspinner