[WikiEN-l] Re: AFD courtesy problem

[Phil Boswell]

"Jimmy Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote in 
message news:43CD62A2.30709 at wikia.com...
[snip]
> What I recommend is the following procedure:
> 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.

This is pretty much [[WP:AGF]] and we should surely be doing this already. 
Shouldn't we?

> 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.

Much as I hate to disagree with the God-King, this is a step too far: 
deleting the discussion altogether is destroying potentially useful 
information.

Why don't we simply adjust the closing instructions so that instead of 
prepending the "discussion closed with such-and-such result" notice, whoever 
closes the discussion **replaces** it with that notice. Then all the 
discussion can be hidden in the history, available to anyone who needs to 
check it out.

Whether this fixes the problem of old discussions turning up on Google and 
mirrors is a whole new problem: maybe we should consider trying to ensure 
that anyone who mirrors Wikipedia updates their mirror regularly.
-- 
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]