[WikiEN-l] Pakistani politicians and systemic bias

[Guy Chapman aka JzG]

On Thu, 8 Nov 2007 9:38:51 +0000, <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
wrote:

>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"?

It varies.  If the funny foreign-sounding word is the name of a
company or product, and the article is packed full of peacock terms,
and the creator has no contributions to anything else, then I might
very well delete without feeling any guilt whatsoever.

Here's a problem, though: there is a tendency to assume bad faith on
the part of deleting admins, and not to address bad speedy tagging
by RC patrollers.  I completely support any initiative to educate
those who patrol recent changes, to persuade them to make better use
of {{prod}} and {{afd}} rather than {{db}}.

I also completely support the idea of renaming AFD to "articles for
discussion" - which in practice it is, since merge is a common
outcome but is not deletion.  "Cleanup in 7 days or nuke" would seem
to me to be a reasonable approach to badly sourced articles.

Still, let's not forget that there are two separate issues here
which manifest in a way that makes them very difficult to separate.
There is the clueless newbie, keen to document a Great New Thing
they found; and there is the die-hard spammer, keen to document the
Great New Thing they are selling.

Any extended period at [[Special:Newpages]] will rapidly lead to the
latter becoming the default assumption, because it happens so much
more often.  Or at least that's my experience.

Perhaps what is missing is a triage stage between RC patrol
identifying a likely problematic article, and the deletion category.
Clearing CAT:CSD of a backlog of hundreds is fundamentally
incompatible with being truly diligent about anything.

Guy (JzG)
-- 
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG