Thank you for your long answer; I understand your ideas a bit better now. Still some questions/remarks.
SJ schreef:
On 7/14/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
SJ schreef:
You contradict yourself here -- yes, many articles brought to AfD are deleted, but you suggest that "the probability that the article is improved" is important; highlighting that AfD is not simply about "delete or keep" but about maintaining quality.
I guess I meant something like: we should not scare away the newbies, and so we should give them the chance to improve the article, even though we know it probably won't happen. What I'm afraid of is something like:
New wikipedian: Hey, where is my article? Oldbies: We deleted it. N: Why didn't you tell me? O: You should have watched the article; it was clearly tagged for Articles for Review, because it needed to be cleaned up. N: I saw that, and I loved the idea of other people polishing up my article, but instead you deleted it! O: *shrug* 90% of all articles brought before AfR are deleted, so you could have expected it...
But I think that your two-phase proposal would not get these reactions, as long as the notices are formulated with some care.
And even the deleted articles should often not be deleted without any further action;
That is not true. If any further action should be taken (like merging useful content), most likely the article shouldn't be deleted; just redirected (and that means that there was no need for the article to be at AfD).
(I'm cutting a large part of your answer here; that is not because I don't appreciate it; as I said, it clarified your ideas.)
[It occurs to me that having such debates and not transcluding them onto the article talk pages points to a deeper problem. None of the four articles mentioned had a peep of the AfD thread on their talk pages...]
Transcluding the AfD page on the talk page... that wouldn't be a bad idea at all...
Again, a reason these discussions should, in cases that are not claerly about 'how to delete', be active reviews, providing feedback to confused editors and broken policy as needed.
(snip)
if a review points to deletion, an AfD discussion might decide it should not be deleted after all -- this might be a more friendly version of DRV, carried out by people who care specifically about deletion and deletion policy, but while the article is still public for all to view its content and edit history.
So, and I'm paraphrasing here, your suggestion is:
* Replace AfD with a two phase process, doubling the amount of work that needs to be done; * increase the quality of discussion in the first phase by asking contributors to put a whole lot more effort into constructive criticism; * and only allow a small part of our editors (the friendly, sensible ones) to comment in the deletion phase.
I agree that such a system, if it were possible, would solve a lot of problems with AfD.
A meticulous process would notify the major authors of an article, and WikiProjects which are following it; looks for content in the article to merge -- this is no longer a part of 'normal editing' since once the closing admin carries out a deletion, normal editors cannot see content to merge it.
See above: if content should be merged, it should be visible to normal editors (which is equivalent to: if normal editors cannot see any content to be merged, the content should not be merged).
Eugene