[WikiEN-l] Massive AfC backlog

[David Goodman]

Agreed. I did in fact have this in mind last night when I encountered
the problem.

But sometimes one does have to say this to a contributor. I
occasionally decline a speedy, and send it or AfD ,   with the reason
being some variant. of "I think the community should decide this
one/". I have a good deal of experience there, but nobody has the
ability to predict with 100% accuracy what the community will do. In a
borderline case, it's fair to give people an opportunity. (In
particular, I will often give them an opportunity if they protest a
speedy  against my advice they are unlikely to succeed)

On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 2:23 PM, Martijn Hoekstra
<martijnhoekstra at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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".
>
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-- 
David Goodman

DGG at the enWP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG