On Mon, 15 Jan 2007 14:16:24 -0500, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org>
wrote:
This thread was never supposed to be about that
article. I brought it
up as an example, because you asked for one, but my purpose was to see
if there was some sort of consensus as to the meaning of CSD A7.
Apparently, there really isn't. At least one person said that
software categorically does not fall under A7, someone said it can,
but only if the article is "blatantly non-notable", and others seemed
to suggest that any article which doesn't claim to have two
respectable independent published sources is a CSD under A7.
If it doesn't even claim to be sourceable? Damn right. Why would we
want an article that fails to make any allusion to the existence of
potential sources? Have you any idea how many unsourced
single-sentence articles get created every day? Visit
[[Special:Newpages]] and you will see why the complete failure to make
any claim to notability is perfectly legitimate grounds for deletion.
Many articles about homebrewed software are made by the programmers
and their friends, we delete them under A7 or G11 or Ignore All Rules
or [[WP:NFT]] or whatever seems appropriate. And if it turns out that
sources *do* exist but the author could not be bothered to add them,
or was working from memory so did not have them to hand, well that's
no big deal, the author can have another go when he has his references
to hand. Verifiability, no original research and neutral point of
view are policies, we can't assess neutrality or anything else without
sources.
This has all the appearance of a breaching experiment. I'm sorry if
it was not, but seriously, did you think your original submission was
actually a valid article? I do hope not.
This particular article wound up staying, at least for
now, most
likely in part because I spent the 41 minutes I spent making sure that
it didn't qualify under even the harshest of interpretations of A7.
But it's still not clear whether or not that was necessary.
You are kidding, right? If you, the article's creator, don't care
enough to make at least a decent stab at covering the subject in a way
that justifies its inclusion, why the hell should anyone else care?
Frequently on deletion review we see people who put more effort into
their arguments for undeletion than they ever did into the article. We
had one guy absolutely demanding restoration of the history of an
article which had been speedied, when said history was a sentence of,
if I recall rightly, under a dozen words, and the article had been
re-created with *actual content* - whole paragraphs of it. It's a
titanic waste of everyone's time. Wikipedia is a wiki - crap articles
get deleted, people come along and create better ones that don't. I
have a hard time seeing this as a big problem. A redlink is probably
*better* than an unreferenced half-sentence stub, after all, because
someone who gives a shit might come along and make an actual article.
This thread is now at least three orders of magnitude bigger than your
original submission. Does that not strike you as absurd?
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG