On 7/14/07, SJ 2.718281828@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_2...
What can I say, we've met our enemy and it is definitely us.
—C.W.