[WikiEN-l] Ignoring AfD results / Redirection and deletion

[Mark Ryan]

An article named [[Characters in the Animal Crossing series]], which
was crufty and about characters in a Nintendo video game, got listed
in June for deletion by [[User:A Man In Black]]. That user cited its
game-guide nature as a reason for its deletion. The article passed the
AfD with a consensus to "keep", about 7 users to 2.

Less than a month later, [[User:Aaron Brenneman]] replaced the
article's contents with a redirect to [[Animal Crossing]], the article
on the first game in the series. He cited on the talk page his reasons
for doing this as being: "no sources, multiple clean up tags, better
dealt with in parent article, unencyclopedic tone".

This redirection was left alone for almost a month, until [[User:A
Link to the Past]], one of the voters in the AfD, noticed the
redirection and reverted it. This led to a revert war with the
original deletion nominator, A Man In Black, who seemed keen to
enforce this redirection which had accomplished what his failed AfD
did not.

Upon my questioning of him about it, A Man In Black seemed nonchalant
about this redirection ignoring consensus reached on the AfD, saying
that the article is substandard (etc) and the AfD consensus should be
effectively ignored, in favour of his own personal opinion about its
encyclopedic nature (or lack thereof). I encouraged him to start
another AfD, but he said he did not want it to be deleted, simply
redirected.

Which brings me to the main reason for this email (thank you for
reading this far, all 3 of you!). Deleting an article with a strong
"keep" AfD vote is clearly against consensus and therefore a violation
of deletion policy. But is changing the article into a redirect to be
considered effectively the same as a deletion, for these purposes?

Stories about AfDs failing (for no consensus) because votes are evenly
split between "redirect" and "delete" are absurd, because all of the
voters clearly do not want the article to continue to exist in its
present form.

Surely the opposite can also be said of a "keep" consensus AfD: most
of the voters plainly want the article to continue to exist as an
article, not as a redirect and not deleted.

~Mark Ryan