On Nov 8, 2007 11:44 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.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".
Very true. The buck stops with the deleting admin, every time. Sure, we should try and educate non-admins on what does and does not qualify for speedy deletion, but it's an unattainable goal. If we could achieve it, we could do away with admins and give the tools to everyone. As it stands, we know we can't trust all non-admins to know what they're doing, so we only allow admins to delete.
Absolutely. Few things piss me off more than admins who delete on sight without even Googling the article title or looking in the history. We stand to lose nothing by waiting a few minutes to delete, and who knows - we may even discover the article is worth having, or a way to improve the article as it stands.
Having said that, we should also be putting effort into educating users about CSD, and perhaps consider revising them (though knowing the inertia of WP policy, this is practically impossible). The CSD as they stand are often interpreted in ways that encourage systemic bias, or otherwise encourage false positives for deletion. An obscure religious group? Why, it's an article about a "group of people" which does not assert notability, even if the article is one of the better-written and -formatted articles on [[Special:Newpages]].
But having said that, if the problem is primarily systemic bias, perhaps focusing on things like CSD avoids the larger problem of systemic bias - how do we change people's thinking? It's easy to say "The procedure for reviewing speedy tags should be X, Y and Z" but not change people's actual thinking when it comes to things they're not familiar with - and the end result is not only wrongly deleted articles, but wrongly merged articles, wrongly redirected articles, wrongly rejected FAs/GAs (the latter in particular), etc. These all harm the encyclopaedia, and they are all symptoms of the underlying problem of people's tendency to mistrust the unfamiliar. We need to think about how to change that mindset.
Johnleemk