On 1/20/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@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