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

[Kirill Lokshin]

On 5/8/06, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> I point out that we don't need voting for AfD, which is why we
> changed it away from VfD, and that the proper way to close an AfD is
> to look at the arguments and how they adhere to Wikipedia policy...

And here we come to the key problem with the entire model: there
_isn't_ an objective policy to deal with these things.  (Certainly
there are some policies, like verifiability, that can be used; but the
lack of consensus for a more comprehensive "notability" policy is the
issue.)  Once you strip away all the arguments about "notability" and
the sea of guidelines and pseudo-guidelines and random acronyms, you
get something like:

* Delete, subject is not appropriate for an encyclopedia.
* Keep, subject _is_ appropriate for an encyclopedia.

which is about as subjective a standard as you can get.  We can
certainly appoint someone to judge the relative arguments and decree
an outcome, but the question is fundamentally one of differing
perceptions of what Wikipedia should strive to be, not one of simply
applying existing policy.

Kirill Lokshin