On 6/10/07, The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/10/07, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/10/07, The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
Since it isn't, it gets put through AfD to force someone to put up a real reason. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, other than people write this kind of article in the first place instead of providing the notability themselves.
If you have been nominating, for deletion, articles which you believe could (or even should) be improved rather than deleted, please cease and desist right now.
Well, as a rule I don't nominate AfDs, though at times I do go through them. But even so, as a rule, I don't believe that articles can be improved unless I know something about the topic which I believe is notable and which the article doesn't include. For bio articles on people in notable positions, it's not up to me to search for some real notability about the person, and it is especially not up to me to dig up some personal detail to pad out such an article.
The thing about most such articles is that they can't be improved. I don't fight it personally, because every attempt I've made to get reasonable notability standards set up has been rebuffed by the combined forces of the "it's useful" crowd and the "you want to delete all my work" crowd. But I see lots of articles, especially bios, which could only really be justified by some considerable research, which might not turn up anything anyway. Someone putting a trivial, notability-less article doesn't obligate anyone else to do the work to prove its notability, and particularly in the case of BLPs I think such articles ought to be speedily deleted.
"The thing about most such articles is that they can't be improved."
Pleaese don't knock editors who can and do put in the effort to research and make a decision based upon the value of the article to Wikipedia, just because you don't.
If I go to AfD and look at articles and vote on them, I decide, based upon WP policies and the information I am able to find, whether or not the article belongs in Wikipedia, not whether or not the editor should have put in better references (you'd be voting to delete [[Rock climbing]] based upon your criteria).
I've fixed up or contributed to fixing up a lot of articles that actually belong in Wikipedia. It just doesn't take a lot more effort than voting, "Delete" it really can't be improved. How can you prove a negative when you're not even trying?
See Daniel Rodriguez. It's the type of small biography that has a place in Wikipedia, but not necessarily in Britannica. But, just because it wasn't perfect, it was up for deletion (not by a deletionist, though). But people put effort into making it a good article, because it is Wikipedia content.
AfD is a process that is being abused--that's how it wound up with an editor vandalizing an account and then nominating it for deletion based upon it missing information he had just removed--that IS the atmosphere at AfD: delete, delete, delete. But that won't write an encyclopedia.
AfD is less work than researching an article. I've been adding sources to plant articles for the last 24 hours--it's a lot of work, verifying first the article has the correct name, checking higher level taxonomies, finding sources, typing in the darn references with 25 word titles, moving articles, and their redirects. AfD is a much easier boost to my edit count.
Half the articles at AfD every time I got there can be fixed, many require simple fixes.
I really don't know what the AfD deletionist community is about, but it's not about improving Wikipedia if articles are vandalized to make them eligible for deletion, if topics found in every major encyclopedia out there are up for deletion, and if improving an article that is up for deletion makes the nominating editors hostile towards you. But none of that is about improving an encyclopedia.
KP