[WikiEN-l] Massive AfC backlog

[Martijn Hoekstra]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 7:56 PM, David Goodman <dggenwp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've worked very often at CSD, but I have just now been taking a look
> at AfC, in response to the messages about the backlog. It surprised me
> initially to see that articles I would certainly have passed at speedy
> were being declined there, & I was going to post a complaint about it.
> But then I though it over again:
>
> I think the effectual standard being used by some of the reviewers at
> AfC is not whether it will pass speedy, but whether it would be likely
> to pass AfD.  Though seeing this surprised me at first, i can see
> reason for it . Passing speedy does not mean it is an acceptable
> article. About 500 articles that pass speedy are deleted every week,
> either by Prod or AfD. Speedy is for articles that can be
> unambiguously deleted, and some classes of things that may well be
> utterly non-notable --  such as products and computer programs and
> books -- are excluded from the speedy  process because of the
> difficulty in passing a rapid unambiguous judgment. Why should we
> accept an article at AfC on a self-published book without any reviews
> to be found?  If the rules were to accept it, I would need after
> accepting it to send it immediately to AfD & it would surely be
> deleted. The criterion at speedy A7 is the deliberately very low bar
> of indicating some good faith importance, which is much less than
> notability. Asserting someone has played on a college baseball team is
> enough to pass speedy--a person might reasonably thing an encyclopedia
> like WP should cover such athletes. But we don't, and unless there is
> exceptional non-local sourcing, the article will inevitably be
> deleted.  Why should we accept it at AfC?
>
> In such cases, we serve the user better to direct them to more
> fruitful topics. Perhaps the effective standard should be , having a
> plausible chance at AfD. I agree that some people at AfC are wrongly
> rejecting on the apparent basis of it never having potential for being
> a GA.
>
> Similarly, if the grammar or referencing style is so weak that if I
> accepted it, I would feel an obligation to rewrite it, why should I
> not try to get the original contributor to improve this? We can't
> delete articles even at AfD on such grounds, but should we encourage
> people to write them ?
>
>

I firmly agree with that assessment, but there is something else at
play here too. When someone submits an article for creation, and it is
approved, they should have at least some amount of confidence that it
survives for some period of time. It would be utter madness to on the
one hand say to new contributers "that's good enough, we're tossing it
into mainspace" and on the other see a different editor propose it for
deletion two days later. If you really want to confuse the hell out of
your newcomers, that seems the way to go. If not, then you need to set
standards a little higher. I for one am not willing to tell a new
editor "it's good enough to be submitted, see you at AfD in two days".