[WikiEN-l] A Day in the Life of an Article

[geni]

On 18/09/2007, InkSplotch <inkblot14 at gmail.com> wrote:
> The best faith interpretation I can come up with is someone
> stringently fighting cruft.

Not exactly. More like perceived commercial spam. The real deletion
reason is most likely as combo of G12 and A7.

>True, the article was only one sentance
> and in its short life has only made it up to four.  Sources are few
> and somewhat weak, and notability is iffy.  But how soon is too soon?
> Only twenty-two minutes from creation to a speedy deletion.

Slow. Should have been seconds.

>  A bit
> over two hours from creation to an AfD.

Means nothing. I suspect [[Gustav Weler]] should have been listed on
AFD about 2 years ago but it was missed then.

> Is cruft this bad?  Are stub articles choking the encyclopedia?

Commercial ones yes.

> On
> the flip side, is our good faith really so...short?  How long should
> we give an editor after they create an article to fully source it,
> establish notability, etc.

That really rather depends on the ping time of the admins who happen
to be active.

> How long for an admin?

That should not be a question we ever have to deal with. Most people
kinda understand that after getting through RFA.

> And if there is no
> window of grace in first creating an article, should someone approach
> the bot makers?  Would it make sense to have a bot simply speedy
> articles under a set number of characters?

No bots with admin powers are unpopular and things like short disambig
pages can legitimately have very low numbers of characters.

> I'm concerned about this article, not because of the principles
> involved.  Not because of the frightfully short timeline.  I'm
> concerned because I can't see any reason to be so stringent about
> trying to eradicate a simple little article.  Whether it be between
> editors, admins, or "people we expect to know better."

hang out with Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam sometime

> Because we do, don't we?  We expect some people to know better.  Look
> at the article, [Mzoli's Meats], look at the history below, and go
> ahead...go "oh, well, that's DIFFERENT." But really, I can't even see
> how different might cut it either.  I just can't.  Please, someone,
> help me understand this.
>
> 09:33, September 17, 2007 Jimbo Wales (Talk | contribs) (206 bytes)
> (just a stub for now, will be adding pictures and more in coming
> days... I need help finding reliable sources though)
>

I think you are making two errors. First Jimbo is not in the
conventional sense an admin. His edit history would not get him
through RFA. One of the thing RFA does fairly well is make sure that
admins have a pretty good ah street level knowledge of wikipedia.You
don't write articles shorter than a paragraph say 3-4 lines. There was
a reason substubs were abolished. Anyone who gets through RFA will
know this instinctively.

Secondly since for the most part wikipedia editors are trained rather
than natural Jimbo is at a bit of a disadvantage. He's never had to go
through the indoctrination and training the average wikipedian has to
go through just to get by. Thus he is going to make mistakes.

If say Raul654 was getting his articles deleted straight off I would
be worried. Jimbo? not so much.

-- 
geni