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

[Charlotte Webb]

On 7/14/07, SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> This post gave me an interesting idea.
> <snip/>

Even speaking as someone who always got annoyed as hell at people who
put an AFD tag on something and then openly admit they have no desire
to see it deleted (usually they just want what they think will be a
permanently binding "to merge or not to merge") I still kinda sorta
agree with what you're saying about de-emphasizing the possible
outcome of deletion.

We have "good article review" and "featured article review". Maybe the
next step is to shut down the AFD process and replace it with some
sort of "shitty article review" with the expectation that people
actually familiarize themselves with the article content, and try also
to familiarize themselves (as best they can) with the subject before
commenting.

An added "learning curve" if you will could reduce the amount of
derogatory drive-by "NN, delete" voters. For each article, rather than
asking people whether they think something is "deletable", we should
focus on less destructive options such as merging, removing unsourced
material, finding new sources, adding new material, picking up the
slack and actually trying to succeed where the original writer failed.

> 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?

We do have various templates for categorizing redirects, such as {{R
with possibilities}}.

I doubt it would be a good idea to make such links appear red (or even
in a third color like purple or green) because for every dedicated
wiki-gnome on the project there are at least 2.5 gremlins who will
wander around at the same pace, silently removing removing the
brackets from every red link they see. This group overlaps somewhat
with the other people who systematically change all redirects to piped
links because they think it makes the server go faster.

As a result, whenever somebody does write an article, but it will be
low-hanging fruit for the AFD trolls (at least the ones who often
patrol [[Category:Orphaned articles]]). Eager readers and editors
interested in related subjects won't even notice that it came and
went.

Later we might get a second draft (maybe 10-15 Kb) from somebody who
is more serious about their editing and goes to great lengths to
ensure that every article mentioning the topic also has the decency to
link to it. This person might get blocked for "link spam" and the
article will get a {{db-repost}} tag from some new-fangled automated
script which checks each new page creation against the deletion log
for that title.

Before anyone says I'm grossly exaggerating, I'm going to say no, not
really. I've seen all of these happen. Not with the same article of
course, but it's only a matter of time before Wikipedia finishes
becoming its own worst enemy.

There's tons of room for improvement in every step of the game,
however it's not an issue of technique but more of a cultural problem
and I don't have any ideas on how to fix it.

Honestly, what can be done about people who have an overtly
deletionist agenda from the moment they arrive, ones who ostensibly
think they are helping the project by putting a {{prod-nn}} on every
politician from Bangladesh or every actor from Argentina or every
soccer player from Upper Whatchacallistan.

> "this article is about a subject which may not be
> <span class="angry salad">[[WP:N|notable]]</span>
> enough to be included on Wikipedia"

Seriously who the comes up with this shit and why the hell do we still have it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/2007_May_28#Template:Prod-nn

What can I say, we've met our enemy and it is definitely us.

—C.W.