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

[SJ]

This post gave me an interesting idea.

On 7/13/07, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.

We've renamed VfD this once, to get rid of the 'votes', since it
shouldn't be about votes.  Perhaps it is time to get rid of the D,
since it isn't really about deletion -- which involves an initial
assumption of bad faith -- but about review: what is the author
thinking?  If the author is really trying to convey useful information
about an encyclopedic and notable subject (good faith), how can we
help them improve their work / extract better information from them /
guide them to reasonable style guidelines?   "Articles for Deletion"
could be something related, very specific, and altogether different.

It might be sensible to have a cleanly generalized "Articles for
Review" page that decides what to do with articles that have trouble.
Does it get pushed off to a subgroup, say via {{delete}} or
{{cleanup}}?  perhaps there are niceties to be followed when deleting
something -- check in with the main authors, decide whether or not to
delete the talk page as well, archive as appropriate, update inbound
links, doublecheck that the authors aren't serially doing something
they shouldn't be.  This could go to an "articles for deletion"
project -- at which point it is not about WHETHER to delete, but HOW.
 Then it would make sense for the deletionists and people who care
about keeping the encyclo clean to run that shop.

Is it decided that the topic deserves an article, but not this one?
Then there are niceties too.  salvage what is mergeable, identify the
best place to redirect the article -- perhaps one of the options is a
page about how to create a new article -- and again update the main
authors to date.  In this case the talk page should surely be
preserved.  If there is a contentful merge, decide whether to merge
page histories or simply preserve them on the target talk page.

Is it clear that the topic deserves an article, but it really isn't
any good yet?  different levels of {{cleanup}} are possible; one might
be a {{rescue}} template to help stave off merging or redirection.

Finally, do we need a variant of #REDIRECT that clearly identifies
that the original title should have its own separate article someday,
but doesn't now?  something that allows links to still show up as red
in MediaWiki?

SJ