[WikiEN-l] Nominations for deletion, too short, not trivia

[John Lee]

On 6/7/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/6/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 05/0
> > This is just *stupid*. This is what putting something up for deletion
> > is *for* - saying "This article may be deleted, please look at it and
> > give your opinion" - and there is no more effective way to do it than
> > AFD, for all its faults. I have no idea why you believe someone needs
> > to be personally prejudiced towards deleting the article in order to
> > raise this question
>
> It's a really annoying habit. There are genuinely articles that should
> be deleted out there. And plenty of others that aren't, but were
> nominated for crappy reasons. Nominating articles apparently at
> random, just to give AfD'ers something to think about is just creating
> work for everyone, with little benefit.
>
> If you're not sure whether an article should exist, use {{nn}} or
> something and start a discussion on the talk page. Nominating for AfD
> is saying "This should be deleted, all in favour?!" Not for "What do
> people think?"


I think Kelly Martin, myself and a few others pointed out this problem one
or two years ago. At the time Kelly was pushing for AfD to be renamed to
something more focused on discussion of article quality. As I said then, AfD
is basically the low-end counterpart to FA. People ignore things like peer
review because there's no real action that comes out of them - how much
attention does your article get if it's tagged with a notability tag? From
my experience, not much - at least, that's how it's been with PR where
there's even a centralised list of articles with summaries of concerns about
them.

The basic problem is, people put articles on FA and AfD when they want
discussion about them, because our other processes for outside input on
articles don't work when there's no end objective in sight.

Johnleemk