[WikiEN-l] To boldy delete what no one had deleted before!

[White Cat]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 8:34 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 11/01/2009, White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Even so there exits people who mass remove (redirectify/merge/delete -
> take
> > your pick) content. Mass creation isn't that big of a deal. Junk can
> always
> > be dealt with. Junk has never been a serious issue as the definition of
> junk
> > has been rock solid all along.
>
> I do not believe this to be the case. And as you say yourself:
>

Tens of thousands of articles were removed by one individual (User:TTN) via
the means I listed in the past year and a half. This was done without
securing a general consensus. He himself said that his motivation was merely
to get rid of articles he feels are junk (which are practically every
article on fiction). He was sanctioned for his conduct by the
arbitration committee as he was revert waring among other things.


> > A problem has emerged when people decided to
> > expand the definition of junk to include entire categories of articles
> > without securing a consensus for it.
>
> In other words, others definition of junk differs from yours,
> presumably because their value system varies.
>


In other words there is a lack of consensus. Meaning no mass action of any
kind should be taken until a consensus is secured.


>
> > An elite group of self righteous users does not add up to such a
> consensus.
> > If such people truly cared about the well being of the encyclopedia they
> > would have spent the time to secure the consensus before taking action.
>
> Thinking laterally, just an idea:
>
> Slashdot has an interesting thing where they have ratings for
> postings, with different categories. They then permit you to consider
> certain categories to be more or less important to you (e.g. funny
> postings may be raised up in the rating meaning you're more likely to
> see them).
>
> In principle a similar thing could apply to the wikipedia, if we don't
> do a hard delete to articles (or only for the truly nasty vandalism
> stuff), but simply rate them along multiple axes then it could be
> possible for a user to indicate to the wikipedia what he or she
> values, and only articles that are highly enough rated for their own
> set of values would appear, (with a default set of values used for
> anonymous users.)
>
> Doing it that sort of way potentially avoids the either it's suitable
> for our glorious wikipedia; or it isn't dichotomy, and permits poor
> quality articles a chance to improve below the waterline before
> becoming full-fledged articles.
>
> I'm not saying it would be a perfect system, but it would probably be
> better than what we have right now; in other words we would have far
> less deletionism, because we would have far fewer deletes.
>

Can you at least explain me how such a ranking would slow down or stop
deletionism? Such types of ranking already exists.

For example Googles results are based on popularity. If more people are
going to the 'Beowulf 2007' article than the 'Beowulf' article, that is
hardly the fault of the authors of the articles.

More history related topics are featured than fiction related topics. That
alone is a ranking difference if you ask me.

Such a ranking may provoke deletionism more. Consider a case where a history
related topic gets a rating lower than a fiction related topic. Instead of
improving the poorly written history related topic deletionists pursue
seeking the deletion of the fiction related topic (which may not necessarily
be better in quality). It is much easier to delete something than improve
it.

- White Cat


> >    -- White Cat
>
> --
> -Ian Woollard
>
> We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
> imperfect world would be much better.
>
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