On 9/11/06, Zoney zoney.ie@gmail.com wrote:
I'd agree. I don't know what the solution is, but there has to be something better than have a small group of people discuss/vote (the latter despite the use of newspeak) on deleting articles, when those who are involved on AFD are either an uninvolved and usually ignorant (of the subject) group, or an involved but biased group brought there by message-spamming/vote-rigging. In fact, having the latter group represented as fully as possible is entirely reasonable.
However, it's laughable to suggest that AFD reflects the consensus of Wikipedia editors, and further than that, that would not even be sensible either. It is not sustainable to suggest the majority would be correct. Finally, having such random groups of editors discuss/vote makes little reference to what readers would like.
Well, yes. AFD and its ilk are designed precisely to maximize the ability of the "uninvolved" to !vote on as many nominations as possible, as efficiently as possible. (Hence the emergence of WikiVoter, or whatever they're calling it this week.) This is not a function of the particular details of the process, incidentally, but rather the fact that a rigidly centralized process like the current AFD necessarily encourages people to participate on topics of which they are mostly ignorant (and about which they couldn't care less, usually -- except for the fact that they happened to come up in that day's deletion listings).
(The obvious consequence of this is that we can expect any fundamental change to AFD will be rigidly resisted by those whose heavy participation in the deletion process might be curtailed by such a change.)