On 3/11/08, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@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.