[WikiEN-l] Pakistani politicians and systemic bias

[Guy Chapman aka JzG]

On Thu, 8 Nov 2007 18:21:38 +0000, "Andrew Gray"
<shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

>(I don't think we're assuming bad faith so much as we're assuming
>laziness... or that they assume good faith of the taggers too much!)

Well, yes, or some combination of good intentions and bad
experience.

>Indeed. However, bad speedy tagging - through misunderstanding or
>overenthusiasm - is inevitable, so our admins are always going to have
>to stay on their toes and make judgements as to whether or not
>deletion is appropriate. If we make the tagging better, maybe they'll
>only have to discard 5% of them and not 50%. But there'll still be
>discards or proddings or whatever, and there will be enough of them
>they still need to treat it as likely.

Sure.  The unanswerable question, at this stage, is how many invalid
speedy tags are correctly either untagged or userfied or whatever by
the admins toiling away at CAT:CSD?  I would imagine the chances of
error rise on the days when the backlog is in the hundreds, and I
don't think that's necessarily fixable, we all make more mistakes
when we feel under pressure even if the pressure is self-imposed.

>How about we split CSD, to reflect these two sides?
>i) Material for "urgent deletion"
>ii) Material for "simple deletion"
>Material in i) would be vandalism, attack pages, etc etc; ii) would be
>all the gibberish and spam and vanity and dead redirects and other
>housekeeping.
>Critically, because of the nature of the "bad calls", discussed above,
>we have a nice split whereby material in i) *can* easily be knocked
>off quickly without needing to dig too far - because it is much more
>likely to be legitimately deletable - and material in ii), which we
>accept may get backlogged and may hang around for some time, is the
>material that we are likely to need to spend more time looking at.
>
>ii would tend to become a sort of "speedy PROD", I guess; it gets
>tagged and might go in ten minutes, might be a day. Certainly this
>sort of material conceptually resembles PROD a lot... the split
>between CSD.ii and PROD is an open question. We might end up merging
>the two approaches somehow, but that's another matter.
>
>----
>
>How does that sound? I suspect it would solve a lot of the problems
>relating to real or presumed urgency, and would keep people from
>feeling they had to move fast on disputable material. It would also
>allow us to expedite dealing with the actually damaging stuff, which
>is a plus in anyone's book.

It works for me, anyway.  What I want to see is a system where
damaging and unambiguous crap (attack pages, copyright violations,
test pages, obscenity and the like) is dispatched as fast as
possible, with the balance being given at least a little bit of
thought.  

The problem is that unsourced biographies are in my view dangerous,
and many of these are actually user pages created "by mistake"
(ahem) in mainspace.  I don't know how we deal with that in your
proposed system, but that does not mean it is a fundamentally bad
idea, actually I think it's a fundamentally *good* idea.

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