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

[Ray Saintonge]

David Gerard wrote:

>On 14/07/07, phoebe ayers wrote:
>  
>
>>To go towards fixing this, we should make notifying the original author
>>about deletions mandatory;
>>    
>>
>The AFD regulars have consistently held this to be far, far too
>onerous. I suspect there's some presumption of bad faith in there as
>well, because monitoring for crap does produce a bit of a siege
>mentality.
>
Yeah, having to spend time with such notifications, or investigating the 
history of an article detracts from the efficient operation of 
deletions.  I would take it further than Phoebe to include notices to 
all significant contributors to an article.  For a silly nomination like 
[[Chess strategy]] this would include notices to many established people 
who made contributions a long time ago, and have gone on to other things 
-- like me who made a few small edits in April and May 2002.

>(Remembering that most of what gets deleted really is *complete crap*.
>We're concerning ourselves on this thread with the false positives.)
>
That too.  And those false positives get more attention than they 
deserve.  How they handle these borderline cases becomes the basis on 
which we judge all the work of the AfD gang.  When they exercise poor 
judgement or become confrontational over borderline articles people 
begin to question their judgement on everything, and even the pure crap 
gets more scrutiny.

>>we should hold admins to a higher standard in
>>writing descriptive edit summaries when they delete an article;
>>    
>>
>I shall try to be more flowery in my deletion summaries.
>
Be careful of the thorns in that bed of roses.

>>we should
>>encourage *all* regular editors to review prods and afds (not just the "afd
>>regulars");
>>    
>>
>I urge all those here who have not done so to go through
>[[Special:Newpages]]. Read one day's load of the thing, and remember
>that those are the articles that *survived*. THE HORROR. THE HORROR.
>
Gee thanks!!!!!  I just went there and wasted 5 hours.

>>we should rewrite the help pages on deletion so it is *really
>>obvious* what is going on (since that is where normal people get sent, and
>>the pages are a clusterfuck of contradictory documentation currently);
>>    
>>
>As far as I can tell, the stage of trying to get one's way on
>Wikipedia by playing WikiNomic kicks in between three to nine months
>in. Some never get out of it.
>
>AFD has long been the site of WikiNomic trench warfare. We're talking
>Belgium early 1918 here.
>
The [[Battle of Messines]] did a good job on that.

>>and
>>we should seriously consider a proposal like SJ's where articles are shunted
>>into a "what do we do with this" queue instead of automatically going to
>>deletion when there are serious concerns.
>>    
>>
>It is a very nice suggestion. Now to make it fly.
>
I was encouraged by what happened when there was a common sensible mind 
about what to do with the spoiler warnings.

Ec