Hi!
On Sun, Jun 26, 2016 at 4:01 PM, David Goodman <dggenwp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I was the person who tagged the article we are
discussing for deletion as
no indication of importance.
Thank you for commenting here and for you work! I know it is a lot of
work and that errors are possible. This is completely expected. I
really appreciate all the admins and the work they are putting in.
This reduces the error rate to about 0.05 to
0.25%,and I cannot imagine how and
crowd-sourced process could do better.
This sounds amazingly low! Great job!
The procedure worked in this case; I seem to have made
one of my errors,
and another editor caught it; the article was not deleted, but was sent to
one of our two areas for further work on articles, the editor's user
subpage
No, the article was deleted. And was restored later on to my user
space after I got frustrated at first and then decided to retry the
whole process and dive deeper into editing Wikipedia practices. I must
say that this diving was interesting, that I learned many new things,
and were welcomed by many very friendly and helpful people.
All too many articles go to user subpages or
draft space and never get heard of again; more important, many potentially
good editors whose material is challenged do not have enough confidence to
complain or enough knowledge to complain effectively.
This would be for me a much better experience. If somebody would move
it to a draft space and say, "hey, please improve it first, before
putting it to the main namespace" I would completely understand the
process. I did not know of this practice that people create articles
first in draft spaces and then move them to main once they are deemed
ready. I thought that I should just create an article which is missing
and make it a stub so that it is clear that it is still in process.
But it got deleted in a day, without any discussion on its talk page,
and I got lost access to its content. This made me confused as an
editor who is not very familiar with processes.
In general I think this should be the practice. If something is not
clearly illegal or something, then it should be moved to a draft
space. And if not improved in a month or so, deleted. (The latter
could probably be done automatically.)
Why is this not a common practice? I think it is a good compromise
between deletion and experience of editors.
So where there are clear steps what steps should be taken to improve
the thing I think this is great. For example, when the speedy deletion
tag was added to my article, there was a clear next step: on the talk
page start a discussion why it should not be deleted. I did that. But
instead of expected discussion, article was just deleted. This
confused me because I was not assuming I am doing anything wrong. I am
going step by step as instructed.
If instead it would be moved to draft space and said, "the article is
not yet to the standard of Wikipedia, it lacks clear statement of
notability, you have a month to improve it afterwards it will be
deleted" I would have known what to do, even without reading rules.
And it would be also a very reasonable thing for me to observe.
I think the main issue with deletion is that it is a cut-off point,
something where the flow of working on an article is abruptly cut and
one cannot continue without asking for help. This requires a really
high activation potential.
Articles on small organization, commercial and
non-commercial, and on the people associated with them, are the ones most
prone to advertising. I once also thought about dividing the site as a
potential solution, but if we divided the site, the advertisers know
very well the significance of having an article on WP, and would still
want to be in the part where the most important articles go.
Exactly, but this is a good thing, no? So the editors who are not
advertisers would be OK with articles being in the draft space until
they are made to the good quality, and advertisers would not like
that.
So why is this argument against moving articled to the draft space
instead of just deleting them?
The only really effective way to rid us of
promotionalism is to ban
anonymous editing, and immediately reject any edits from people associated
with the organization or found to be paid editors.
Hm, but I must say that this is slightly contradictory to the issue of
notability and significance. Because one way to address the issue of
promotionalism is to allow articles about corporations to exist, but
be very bare and simple: there is this organization with this name, at
this location, with this founders, it produces milk. The end. Not much
space for PR. What is wrong with such an article? Maybe it is
important only to that local community who would search for all
companies producing milk in their area. Or students who would like to
create a map of all companies producing milk in their area. Or maybe a
professor wants to determine which milk company the school should go
to for a trip and would like to see which are around.
In fact, the requirement for notability to me means that I have to
create great statements about this company. Why it is important. Why
it is the best. Why it should be included.
If, on the other hand, the article was plain and simple, this would be
easier. And then later on those students can come to the Wikipedia
article about a company they visited and add a photo of it to the
article, and explain what they learned during the visit about the
history of the company.
Mitar
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