On 3/11/08, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
A while back I was going through some old AfDs looking
for "merge and
delete" GFDL violations, and when I found them I simply redirected and
undeleted them without asking anyone or going through any sort of
"process". Not one was ever challenged, that I know of, or likely even
noticed. Now granted changing a redlink into a redirect is not something
likely to draw attention, but I think for really egregious examples of
poorly done AfDs a "bold-revert-discuss" approach could work just fine.
If anyone complains it can then be taken to DRV or wherever else these
things are supposed to be discussed.
Excellent idea. I'm glad somebody besides me cares about the
relationship between AFD and the GFDL. Unfortunately this will
probably be very difficult and searching for 'q="merge and delete"
site:en.wikipedia.org' will be bloody useless due to the robots.txt
exclusion of Google-Bot from AFD pages. As it is most of the results
are from CFD where it has a completely different meaning.
Tensions and objections may be further eased if we
focus our efforts on
reviewing AfDs that are over a year old, or some other such arbitrary
threshold. We're more likely to get fresh faces reviewing our actions
that way and even those people who did participate in them will have had
lots of time for any heat to fade.
Another excellent idea, but how would you know where to look? Even if
you can view the deleted edits, how would you know which titles to
look under? Tool-server access might be be a necessity. Get a list of
red-link titles according to number of deleted edits (this could be
extremely helpful for finding "merge and delete" incidents), or any
other meaningful filter you can think of.
—C.W.