[WikiEN-l] Pakistani politicians and systemic bias

[Guy Chapman aka JzG]

On Thu, 8 Nov 2007 14:49:31 +0000, <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
wrote:

>> 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}}.
>
>Whoa. The admins are hand-picked. Anyone who can get online can come and start adding templates. Admins are picked just because they can be trusted with "delete" and other tools. The correct decisions for an admin with a suspect speedy range over "pass" or "not a speedy, I'll take off the tag". They do not include "if I don't delete within 30 seconds, no one ever will, so here goes".

When did you last go to [[CAT:CSD]]?  Even a 1% error rate will
amount to tens of articles every day, and I don't think 1% is an
unacceptably high error rate (or rather, shooting for less is
probably unfeasible, given the rate of pay).

We have deleted over 5,000 articles in the last 24 hours.  That
included an article on a "six foot tall single-celled organism,
'nuff said" and "your single source for all things mountain bike".

Are you sure you are not being perhaps a little nostalgic here?  The
simple fact is, very large numbers of worthless articles are created
and deleted daily, and slowing down the removal of those will likely
have an exponential impact.  When the CAT:CSD backlog is below 500,
there is a realistic chance of assessing each article in more
detail.  But it rarely is, at least not in peak hours. 

I always look for the biographies first.  A fair few of them are
obvious autobiographies, the username is very often a dead giveaway.
To userfy, remove the redirect, untag and leave a {{nn-userfy}}
explanation takes just short of two minutes, including the time to
verify the username and user's other contribs (generally none, of
course).  I don't mind doing that, but it would be better if the RC
patrollers did it instead.  I'm sure there are admins who don't
bother, and that's a concern for me per [[WP:BITE]], but even so,
the problem of vapid self-promotion is one that must be
acknowledged.  

Is vapid self-promotion more of a problem than biting the
self-promoters?  Or does it depend  on whether they are promoting
themselves, their websites or their companies?  I honestly don't
know.

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