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

[Eugene van der Pijll]

SJ schreef:
> 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.

AfD really is about deletion: at least 75% (I don't know the exact
percentage) of the articles brought to AfD are deleted. Naming it
anything but "Votes for Deletion" misrepresents what is happening. That
could lead to new contributors missing the point of the nomination,
and that may lower the probability that the article is improved. (At
least, that was an objection the last time this was proposed.)

> 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.

So the decision to delete an article or not is taken entirely at the
"Articles for Review" page? See above about misleading page names.

And what do you mean by "HOW"? There is only one way to delete an
article: the "delete" tag at the top of the page. (Proposals to merge or
redirect should not be brought to AfD, at the moment; those are just
part of "normal editting")

> 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?

We already have that: [[Template:R with possibilities]].

> something that allows links to still show up as red
> in MediaWiki?

Not a red link; people who want to know more about the subject will not
click them, defeating the whole point of a redirect; and people who
would want to create an article would arrive at an existing page...

Perhaps a normal blue link, but one which ends up at an intermediate
page? "We have no article about this subject, but we do have one on this
related subject: [[.....]]. If you want to start a new article with this
name, click [here]." That could be done without changing MediaWiki, of
course.

Eugene