[WikiEN-l] How friendly are we to Newbies? Create an article as a newbie challenge now paused

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 5:56 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> But CSD *isn't for deleting everything that should be deleted*.  So the
> fact that the article doesn't fit CSD but should be deleted anyway isn't
> a loophole.  Plenty of things which should be deleted don't fit CSD.

Absolutely.

The intention of CSD is to reduce the overhead related costs of the
full deletion process for classes of deletions which are broadly
uncontroversial.

"Your speedy deletion of X was bogus because the matter of articles of
X-type being deleted is not at all clearly clear, and I think the
article should be kept"  is a clearly reasonable objection.

"Your speedy deletion violated paragraph 3 sub-paragraph 2 section A
of speedy code 27b/6.", without any tying back to the intent of the
rules and the goodness of the outcome is another matter entirely…

If we're really to the point where we have to make boundary-testing
articles to probe the process as clearly good newbie articles are
being kept, then the problem can't be that bad. ...

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Carcharoth
<carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> If the title is valid, it is easier to turn it into a redirect and
> merge any content not already mentioned in the existing article (a
> s-merge as it is sometimes called). The failure to consider moving

In this case it was one sentence of the "X is a Y" form, and we
already had an article on X by another name. Calling anything coming
out of that a 'merge' would be a polite lie at best.  It's one I've
made before… but we should still call it for what it is.

Many of the redirects I've created in the past were later deleted. I
don't know that anyone has any clue what the criteria is for keeping
redirects or not, so I can't say that one should have been created
here.  Since no one seems to have joined clubs based on redirect
preferences there doesn't really seem to be many loud arguments about
the right criteria.

The conversion of an article to a redirect is equivalent to straight
deletion, the most significant exception is the deletion may have
missed an opportunity to create a useful redirect. (In my view, the
fact that the old text is available in a highly obscure location
rather than a very highly obscure location isn't very important). It's
harmful to miss the redirect, but if your goal is to improve redirects
there are MANY more low hanging fruit that could be addressed before
worrying about deletions which should have been redirect conversions.

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 3:05 PM, George Herbert
<george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> I disagree that this rose to the level of a breaching experiment.
> However - it was intended as an experiment, not a way to pick on
> individual new page patrollers.  And ended up being perceived as the
> latter, rightly or wrongly.  And that wasn't a good thing.
> The lessons and changes to flow out of this (I hope...) need to be
> structural and community, not individual and personal and
> inquisitorial.

My apologies: It was my intent to say that this was walking that line,
not that it was over it. On re-read I see that I didn't at all come
off that way.

I'm sure all involved intended to do well.  I think they'd do best by
avoiding process pedantry and sticking to clear-cut cases which were
handled clearly wrong with a harmful outcome.  There will be fewer
examples of this, but the examples found will be far more compelling.

This kind of experiment is only part data collecting... it also has
the purpose of convincing a wider circle of people that there is a
problem which needs to be addressed.  Only people who are already
convinced are going to be moved by borderline cases.