[WikiEN-l] Quackpotwatch AfD

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 21 Jul 2006 at 17:58, Mark Gallagher wrote:

> Funnily enough, there's a case on RfD of the inverse of that --- an 
> article was AfDed, and someone came along later and created a redirect 
> where the article used to be.  The redirect is now up before the full 
> panel of RfD, facing charges of ignoring consensus with malice 
> aforethought.  One hopes it'll receive a fair trial, but early reports 
> indicate that General Melchitt has already been approached to write the 
> majority opinion.

Unfortunately, there are a number of different possible logical 
interpretations of what an AfD deletion outcome means, and no 
shortage of anal-retentive wiki{judge|lawyer|executioner}s determined 
to enforce any and all of them in the most draconian possible way.

The two main conflicting interpretations are:

1) That a particular bunch of text should be deleted from Wikipedia 
and not allowed to resurface anywhere in the site;

2) That a particular article title should be removed, and not allowed 
to have any article at that title for any reason or with any content;

People voting to delete might actually mean either or both or neither 
of these, but once the outcome is in favor of deletion there are 
those who insist that neither the text nor the title of the article 
ever be allowed to come back in any context.  Thus, when an article 
on a traffic circle in New Jersey was deleted as unworthy of an 
article in its own right, some admins took it onto themselves to 
remove any text mentioning it in other articles such as the one on 
the township it was in, on the basis of "enforcing the AfD outcome."  
And, when an article on an unreleased independent film was deleted, 
admins made a stand for a while not only against recreation of the 
article on the film a few months later when it had been released and 
won a film-festival award, but even against creation of an article on 
an urelated album that happened to have the same name.

-- 
== Dan ==
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