[WikiEN-l] Article Rescue Squadron: Combat medics urgently needed

[John Vandenberg]

On 7/14/07, Steven Walling <steven.walling at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Unfortunately this is not always the case. AfD nominators are not
> perfect and are sometimes operating at least partly in ignorance about
> the subject of the article."
>
> So in other words, in urgin people to check every AFD,  the project assumes
> good faith and poor judgement, intelligence (or both) on the part of all
> nominators. that's even better.

Imagine asking people to check an AFD!!  Every prod and AFD is a
direct statement of bad faith: all effort put into the article to date
has been wasted, and the contributors were crazy for starting the
article.  It is hardly a novel concept that some people assume that
the nominator is completely wrong until proven right.  The default at
AFD is keep, in theory.

This is merely a stab in the dark based on my experience, but I think
that only a third of Afd nominations are clearly correct, and they are
usually closed within a day or two; many of these articles could have
fallen under prod or CSD.  A third of the nominations are about topics
that are inappropriate or borderline, and serious thought is required
by Afd participants.  The rest of the nominations are unnecessary; the
article topic and content are both clearly appropriate and could be
rescued or merged into another article if only someone would assume
good faith and try to build on what the contributors had been trying
to achieve with the article.  But that takes time.  Rescuing one
article could take one person an entire week, including trips to the
library or even learning a little of a foreign language in order to
verify some disputed facts.

On 7/14/07, Steven Walling <steven.walling at gmail.com> wrote:
> Th other thing that I notice about this project is that they neglect to
> notice that completely unencyclopedic or original research  topics are often
> chock-full of good writing and cobbled together citations. It's not just, or
> even primarily, poorly written articles needing improvement that are
> nominated as unencyclopedic. automatically going about and improving
> articles under consideration for deletion as unencyclopedic assumes that not
> only nominators possess poor judegement, but that the community at large is
> so stupid as to not be able to recognize when a small or poorly written
> article is worthy of encyclopedic treatment. The project's motto might as
> well be "Let's help the morons with no vision!"

As far as I can tell, the projects motto is more like "Lets put in a
concerted effort where other people have demonstrated over a long
period that they prefer to vote delete rather than spend four hours
working on an article that is probably going to be deleted anyhow."
Pretty noble intention if you ask me.  The project has done nothing
wrong so far; why try to sink it while it is still in the shipyard?

--
John