On 1/20/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
I think one of the core problems here is that the original nominator
should have raised the issue on the talk page of the article!!! We have
gotten to a cultural state where "Gee, I never heard of this" seems to
be a good enough excuse to nominate something for deletion, RATHER THAN
raising legitimate issues on the talk page first to see if anyone can
help improve the article.
In this case, the nominator should have said "Gee, I never heard of
Fawcett or Playboy, and this New York Times thing sounds fishy, and I
looked in Google and found only n listings for the name, so I wonder if
there's a problem here.
Then, pop a note on the talk page. "Hey everybody, I don't know much
about publishing or science fiction, but I never heard of this guy and
had trouble verifying the information. It's probably my own lack of
searching skills, so I wonder if anyone can help me out here. Is this
article as good as it could be?"
I went through a rather tortured process yesterday in which I had to
really put my foot down to put a stop to a CfD vote which was taking
place without _any_ community dialogue or discussion first.
I do not know the exact solution to this problem, but this is part of an
ongoing problem with have *most particularly with bios of living people
and existing companies*. "I haven't heard of this" seems to be an
instant excuse for "non-notable" and "AfD", which is offensive to
the
subjects, when the real approach should be _at a bare minimum_ and
effort at dialogue with other editors *before* jumping to a "vote".
--Jimbo
_______________________________________________
Here's an idea.
Why not add a template to the article/category/whatever talk's page. Stating
that a discussion about this article is warranted, for whatever reason
(notability, bad category and so forth). So that a category is created with
all those articles and people can have a say on it on the article's talk
page. If after a month or so of discussion people still agree that it should
be deleted, then it can go to AFD/CFD etc.
Of course, no '''Delete'''' 's or
''''Keep'''' 's should be on that
article's talk page.
Garion