[WikiEN-l] Pakistani politicians and systemic bias

[Gwern Branwen]

On 2007.11.08 09:38:51 +0000, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com scribbled 0 lines:
> Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote
>
> > <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >I don't accept the framing. As far as I'm concerned, a deletion is an assertion that the topic is unwelcome. In other words that no useful stub can be made. Not that _no useful stub can be made out of the words on the page_. I'm sure we used to be better at this.
> >
> > Maybe we did, back when we had fewer than two million articles and
> > fewer than a million users, and were not a top-ten site making us an
> > essential part of any vanity, spam or POV-pushing campaign.
>
> Well, this is a live issue. What is the correct level of due diligence for a deleting admin? If it is a funny foreign-sounding name (to native English speakers), or written in bad English, do you do more or less before deleting? Do you think first what the encyclopedia needs, or do you cite policy and say "just following orders"?
>
> Tomorrow, I think, the problem gets exacerbated by re-enabling article creation by IP numbers? That "announcement" was not retracted, I think. So New Pages patrollers get Space Invaders with double aliens. Are we going to benefit with new articles that will correct systematic bias, or, per Guy, will _even less be done_, in an average case, to salvage the articles we are really short of?
>
> Charles

The sketchy statistics seem to show nothing (article creation rate, percentage deleted) changed when IP creation was disabled. Why should we believe that that would change?

On a more humorous note, even if increased the crappy article rate, that might be a good thing - at least then the deletionists will be kept busy taking care of those and not going after good articles. Idle hands, and all that.

--
gwern
64 JRB Iris Bruxelles Tajik uk Goodwin FIPS140-1 FLETC Armani
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