[WikiEN-l] We need a policy against vote-stacking

[Mark Gallagher]

G'day Jimmy,

<many snips/>

> If a bridge is listed on AfD, the result is of course likely to be a
> horrific mess.  People who don't know anything about bridges are likely
> to vote based on pre-existing battles going on there between
> inclusionists and deletionists.  If someone cares deeply about the
> issue, they can campaign for random other friends to come and vote.  The
> admins who go through and clean it up will find it very difficult to
> figure out what to do, having little idea of the reputations of the
> various parties, and therefore have no choice to follow the disastrously
> bad rule of "one user account, one vote" ... even though this includes
> the votes of trolls, newbies, sockpuppets, meatpuppets, idiots *and*
> people who know what they are talking about and should be the ones deciding.

Ah, ah, ah!  Bit disappointed to see this misconception spread by Jimbo 
Wales, of all people.  AfD is not "one user account, one vote": new user 
accounts obviously registered in an attempt to influence an AfD "I'm a 
member of the web forum you're talking about on this here Wokupeja and I 
say keep" are discounted all the time; the opinion of experts, even if 
they don't have accounts, can be and is taken into account (although not 
as often as it should be).

See for instance: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jonathan_Smith_%28games_programmer%29

> Wouldn't it be better in this case to say, you know what, we actually
> have bridge experts, people who know about bridges, and these people
> ought to be the ones deciding, not random people on AfD.
> 
> So how should this work in practice?

Some wikiprojects and the like keep track of deletion debates; I know 
Australian wikipedians like to keep informed of whenever, because of 
ignorance, a good Australian article is about to be deleted or a crap 
Australian article kept, and show up and spread soothing knowledge like 
a balm unto the AfDers in question at the appropriate time.  I suppose 
you could turn the decision over to them altogether?

But this leads to two issues:
a) some Wikiprojects are formed by excellent Wikipedians who share a
    particular interest.  Others are formed by tragics who haven't got
    the faintest clue what an encyclopaedia is and wouldn't care if they
    did, they just want to write instruction manuals and walkthroughs and
    tourist travel guides and ... is that general enough that I don't
    seem to be talking about anyone in particular?  Good.  In any case, a
    Wikiproject formed by people without any sense of self-control would
    not lead to nearly as much informed decision making as one hopes.

b) Wikiproject members have better things to do than go over their
    content looking for stuff to delete, anyway!


Cheers,

-- 
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse


-- 
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.392 / Virus Database: 268.5.2/330 - Release Date: 3/05/2006