[WikiEN-l] Keep and Relist

[Erik Moeller]

I'd like to push the notion of "keeping and relisting" pages on AfD as
- an appropriate means of closing controversial AfDs with a high level
of outside participation
- a good alternative "vote" to express on such AfDs (e.g. "'''Keep and
relist''' on AfD in 4 weeks").

I think the discussion about pages like Eon8 has been hampered by the
perception that a page, once kept, will reside in Wikipedia forever.

To me, this is an example of old-fashioned encyclopedic thinking. But
we are not living in an old-fashioned culture, and Wikipedia is not a
traditional, "patient" medium. We update existing articles with
information about events the moment they happen, whether it's someone
dying or a football score. We often remove or summarize information
that has been added during a particular event once it has phased into
our cultural memory.

However, in the area of judging the existence of articles, I think we
are currently dominated by a "Keep vs. Delete" attitude, the idea that
an article is either "utter rubbish" or "eternal wisdom." We are split
ideologically into factions of "deletionists" or "inclusionists".  I
think this is wrong.

We need novel thinking, because we are dealing with novel problems.
Internet subcultures would like their every fart to be documented for
eternity. Are we going to do that? Of course not. But I don't see
anything wrong in principle with including ephemeral information in an
ephemeral manner.

Of course, there can be no compromise on verifiability or WP:NOR --
Wikipedia is not a soap box or a place to explore novel theories. Nor
am I proposing that spammers should be given room to promote their
products for a "limited time only" (pardon the pun). What I am saying
is that there are ephemeral phenomena that generate a lot of noise in
ephemeral media like blogs, and in many cases there's nothing wrong
with documenting them -- ephemerally.

Erik