[WikiEN-l] AFD courtesy problem

[Conrad Dunkerson]

Jimmy Wales wrote:

> In these entries there are very very very VERY VERY VERY often comments
> which suggest a suspicion that the entry was vanity.
> 
> "Non-notable scientist vanity.  Has very few publications. If he ever
> publishes anything he should submit the page again then." -- paraphrase
> of example problematic comment

This is actually how a friend of mine, Steuard Jensen, first got 
interested in Wikipedia. He's somewhat notable amongst theoretical 
physicists and J.R.R. Tolkien researchers (both small communities) and 
someone put an article up about him. Which was promptly AFD'd with lots 
of comments about his assumed vanity in writing it. His name is on lots 
of pages Google references so it gets lost in the shuffle and wasn't as 
big a deal, but still not a good thing.

> 1. A general meme that it is extremely discourteous without absolute
> positive proof to speculate that the author of some non-notable
> biography is the subject himself or herself.  Yes, it is often true, but
> there is zero gain to us from assuming this rather than assuming the
> opposite.  We really don't care who wrote it: we care if it is worthy
> for inclusion or not.

Human nature. You can try to get people to be 'nice'. With alot of work 
you can even do it... for a while. However, after going through the 
thirtieth bio about J. Smith who won the Kramer County spelling bee 
championship (or whatever) >someone< is going to make a comment. Even if 
  that somehow weren't the case... AfD is in many ways >inherently< 
offensive. It declares a person/group/whatever 'not notable'... when 
they will quite often disagree.

The whole 'Blooferlady' incident (on articles for 'Joseph Vargo' his 
band), which I believe you got involved in, is a good example. She and 
her partner sold quite alot of records and met alot of the listed 
standards for music notability... but she was writing an article about 
her business partner (which also had POV issues) so people voted to 
delete it... and then she had this Google hit saying that her partner 
was an un-notable hack. Yes, she was clearly trying to use Wikipedia to 
'advertise' and that might well be a reason to delete, but not to put 
out what amounts to >negative< advertisement.

> 2. At the close of all VfD debates, the discussion is deleted.  If there
> is a need to have a stub page left there to guide people to the fact
> that there was a prior debate, then create that stub fresh, with the
> history gone.  In the event it is needed, the history can always be
> resurrected by some admin.

Any way we can keep them out of Google works for me. Whether that's 
deleting, blanking, putting them on 'ignore' lists, or whatever... any 
of those options would be better than the current situation.