On Tue, 28 Nov 2006 08:02:07 -0600 (CST), "Jeff Raymond" jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
Everyone agrees that having no sources is, as a whole, bad. Not everyone agrees that wholesale deletion is the answer, however. It would be awfully nice if, instead of changing the culture to remove large swaths of articles, we worked on changing the culture to actually, you know, collaborate on getting sources.
In most of the cases flagged for speedy deletion, though, that would be a titanic waste of time and effort. Most of them have already consumed more community time than they deserve simply through the effort of tagging for deletion. I think the aggregate work that goes into deleting a day's CSD workload almost certainly exceeds the work that goes into creating it.
What I would like to see is the ability of a good-faith editor to place an AfD on hold for five days while it is fixed. Unsourced articles need to go; those which can be sourced need to be sourced and kept. If some sources genuinely can be found then there is absolutely no problem waiting for that, and then weighing up whether that makes the article a keeper. The problem, of course, is preventing abuse by the POV-pushers and other assorted ne'er-do-wells who seem to think that a Wikipedia article on their company, band or New Great Thing is a God-given right. Prod should (should) be kind of like this, in that a prod tag can be removed if an article is fixed up.
Trouble is, we are so weighed down with absolute junk that some good ones are inevitably going to be swept up with the crap. That's why I wanted you to have the sysop bit, so you could check deleted histories and maybe help to rescue some of the better ones. You can always ask me for a history undeletion for a review, of course. As long as it's not a reality show contestant, of course... ;-)
Guy (JzG)