John Lee wrote:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 1/21/06, Travis Mason-Bushman travis@gpsports-eng.com wrote:
I would vehemently disagree, especially when among those ten articles are hoaxes, thinly veiled attack pages, vanispamcruftvertisements and other such content that has the effect of actively making Wikipedia a *worse* and *less authoritative* source of information.
Why should anyone consider Wikipedia to be authoritative? It's written by amateurs. But I agree that we should get rid of tripe. BUt we should discuss it properly. Jimbo is right, there is far, far too much emphasis on deletion.
Bad articles can be identified and improved, or if there's nothing good about them they can be deleted. But there should be more emphasis on improvement. There should be fewer AfD listings carried to term. We should encourage editors to seek innovative solutions, and not fetishize the deletion process. So often these days it seems like a fairground ride--once the journey starts you have to keep your hands inside the car, and mustn't tamper with the deletion proposal. Why on earth not? If an article looks like an obvious redirect candidate, then do it and thank you for saving us five days worth of debate about deletion. Any further discussion can continue on the discussion page.
From someone in the trenches (I've been keeping [[WP:AFD/Old]] 100% backlog free for a week) who has disagreed with Tony before, I have to say that this is an excellent proposal. There's too much reliance on closing admins to do the work. Instead of saying "* '''Redirect''' as per Foo," why the hell not just redirect it?
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
That's the point that annoys me most about AFD: You can't just redirect or merge the articles, because of course once an article is on AFD, it's sacrilegious to remove the AFD tag from the article and forgo the "discussion" that's supposedly happening. So, it's basically locked until it's deleted or kept. Of course, you can still edit and improve it, but I'm not going to do that to an article that I think should be merged or redirected anyway.
grm_wnr