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

Steve Bennett stevage at gmail.com
Tue May 9 07:07:12 UTC 2006


On 5/9/06, Molu <loom91 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> You put it very well. The matter is demonstrated best by the question of notability. I believe all professors can have their articles, in an AfD debate many will disagree with me. Consensus doesn't exist. What is the closing admin supposed to do? If he is to apply his personal opinion regarding the debate then I most certainly disagree. We will be better off with voting than giving admins more power.

You raise a very good point. I quite strongly believe that general
principles should be sorted out in one forum, and AfD should be
strictly about applying those principles to individual articles up for
deletion. It's exactly the same issue as with RfA - I believe we
should as a group decide how many edits are required for an admin, and
set that in stone. Then for any individual candidate, we can simply
check that he meets all the requirements.

In the case of AfD, and more particularly, notability, we can vote on
the proposal "all published academics are notable". Should it pass,
then no "not notable" argument should ever be accepted on a published
academic. And should it fail, then you would need to find another
argument for keeping an individual article on an academic.

Again: too much freedom in votes/consensus discussion is bad. Vote
stacking in AfD, and vote extortion ("if you don't answer my 3
questions in 24 hours, I'm opposing you") on RfA are two symptoms of
this.

>   This system of weighing arguments collapses when there is no argument to weigh. Either I think he is notable or I think he is not notable, neither viewpoint can be established with logic, only numbers. There's a reason that voting is so prevalent in modern democratic societies, it's because better alternatives are very hard to come by.

It can be established with logic if we define what we mean by notable,
and some up with some guidelines. This has helped a lot with articles
on music groups.

Steve



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