[WikiEN-l] You're magically made an admin. What do you do?

[Jeff Raymond]

doc wrote:

> Yeah, but Jeff we have tens of thousands of pathetic articles marked for
> cleanup at it stands - more than we can possibly cope with. So why are
> you so keen to to keep more spammy stubs that /could/ be cleaned up?

Because there's an unfortunate scarlet letter of sorts that gets attached
to previously-deleted material, and there's a vocal sect of editors who
work very hard to make sure that, if they still don't like the article,
it'll stay away.

Furthermore, the cleanup issue, while necessary, is often overblown.  Much
of it is simple formatting issues that could be dealt with on an easier
basis, some are citation issues for things that are completely
uncontroversial and non-troublesome.  Many are simply waiting for the
right editors to come along and do the dirty work, and we get closer to
that as our popularity grows.

This entire mentality feeds into the next point...
>
> If people want to clean up spam, we got stacks of it. The day backlogs
> clear is the day I'll begin to wonder if we could tweek the deletion
> processes to keep a little more 'spam with hypothetical potential'.
> Until then - keep deleting crud.

...that when you continue to arbitrarily delete "crud," (whatever crud is)
what's the incentive to clean up what's there?  We've already alienated a
large, potentially invaluable, group of possible editors because it was
decided that most webcomic articles fall into this "crud" label.  What
next?  How can we complain about the condition on one end when we do
nothing to foster it on the other?

-Jeff

-- 
If you can read this, I'm not at home.