Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Archive 6

Summary of January 2004 – February 2004

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February 2004 summary

This is a summary of Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion for February 2004. See also February uncut.

1. Miscellaneous events and comments in February
   • Wikikiwi noted issues with page size and edit conflicts.
   • Bmills wondered if we needed a reminder that people must read articles before voting on them. Gentgeen agreed. Angela was unsure. Pcb21 thought it unlikely to be effective. Angela said users voting without reading articles should have their votes ignored.
   • Zestauferov proclaimed that "VfD has become a harbour for the same old group of censorship bandits"! He asked people to use talk pages instead and noted the need for clearer policies and summaries of those policies.
   • Sam Spade asked what can be done about trivial lists and zandperl asked what can be done about porn. They were redirected to Wikipedia talk:List and Wikipedia talk:Content disclaimer by Angela and Reddi.
   • orthogonal explained how he fixed an edit conflict. Dandrake apologized for trouble caused and Michael Snow confirmed all was well and removed orthogonal's notice from VfD.
   • Jamesday protected VfD following a page history loss caused by the page being moved. Texture noted sysops were ignoring the protection.
   • Francs2000 fixed something on Feb 27 but didn't say what.
2. Deletion before all votes are complete
   • Texture noted that the deletion policy requires a five-day period to allow people to vote on a deletion request and said deleting early prevents valid consensus as not everyone will have voted. Bmills agreed as a user could come with an irrefutable argument why a page should be kept or deleted. Texture suggested it would be ok for the VfD tag to be removed, but the votes should stay on VfD 5 days. Pcb21 argued keeping items that would not be deleted was "a complete waste of space and resources" but Texture felt it was important for people to see the votes and understand what action was taken. Pcb21 said this was harmful (page too large, genuine listings get lost) and that people could check the page history instead. He clarified this in the deletion policy. Texture still felt people should be allowed to see the votes and requested deletions. Pcb21 said in that case, discussions could be moved to talk pages and noted that it is not necessary for every member of the community to be involved in every minor decision. They continued to disagree on whether policy allowed early removal of fixed items.
   • BL and Angela reported they had removed listings from VfD for space reasons. Angela explained that the point of VfD is to get pages deleted, not to have some discussion on the merits of pages that aren't, which means pages that are not going to get deleted have no reason to remain on VfD.
3. Re-nomination policy
   • Raul654 asked what should be done about re-nominations of kept articles. Angela thought they should be removed. Kingturtle proposed no re-nominations for at least one year. Sj agreed relistings were a problem and thought that people should list less on VfD in general. He said to use cleanup, and to check an article had not been VfD'd before.
   • Anthony DiPierro suggested a three months rule of thumb and felt that if consensus to delete an article was reached, it should be deleted regardless of what happened in the past. He also said there should be a way to take things off VfD early but that this was notspecific to re-nominations. Meelar and Jamesday agreed with Kingturtle though Jamesday said that if an article is clearly significantly worse than the last time it left VfD, there's no need to bar relisting. Relistings would be assisted if VfD discussions were always placed on talk pages.
4. Proposal: shortened VFD time for spammed ads
   • Modemac wanted blatant ads to be more speedily deleted. Pcb21 disagreed and said we should go through the process of identifying whether the website is worthy of an entry, and then re-writing to removed ad-iness. Palapala felt a week for ads was find and that some of these might be interesting if modified. Anthony DiPierro said it wasn't possible to know if something was really just an ad, and said the ad part of an entry, and the non-encyclopedic part, could be blanked, if there is a consensus that this is the case.
5. Moan about how- to listings
   • theresa knott wanted people to stop listing how-tos and moved them to Wikibooks. Gentgeen explained people had objected to the speedy deletion of pages moved to wikibooks. See m:Talk:Transwiki. Davodd said some how tos, such as Poker were appropriate. Angela said that if people want something moved to Wikibooks, they ought to move it to Wikibooks and then list it on VfD and proposed removing listings of items that need to be moved where the person listing it has not bothered to move it. Patrick agreed with the proposal. Dpbsmith wanted to know what was wrong with how tos. See Wikipedia:How-to. Jamesday thought some how-tos and recipes are encyclopedic and said they should be kept. Theresa knott disagreed and said moving to wikibooks was not the same as deleting. Jamesday said links to wikibooks are no good in a print version.
6. Who can decide to remove "clear votes" before seven days?
   • Secretlondon asked who should remove articles from VfD and Pcb21 replied that no-one should remove an entry if they have voted. Later in the month, Texture asked the same question. Anthony DiPierro felt anyone could if there was no reason given for deletion. Francs2000 agreed for items where there was a clear consensus to keep an article, or if an article had been rewritten. Texture still felt additional clarification of the rules was needed.
7. Size
   • Optim brought up the age-old issue of page size. RickK suggested he use edit section links. Optim said even sections were too large, though Angela disputed this.
   • Angela wondered whether we should go back to the page per day scheme or use Wikipedia:Deletion requests instead. Dori proposed sections containing only 10 items.
   • Anthony DiPierro felt the solution was to stop voting on the same issues over and over again and to stop listing things that have no consensus for deletion. Cyan noted that it was not always obvious what will get consensus and through interaction on VfD better solutions can be found. He noted that an adversarial attitude regarding deletions creates an unfriendly atmosphere on the page. Anthony thought VfD was inherently adversarial and thought it not important to bring nominations to anyone's attention. Cyan considered consensus-building and discussion about possible courses of action important. Anthony said VfD is not about consensus-building and that deletion is not a reasonable course of action for the vast majority of nominations. Anthony DiPierro blamed the deletionists for the adversarial nature of VfD and RickK blamed the inclusionists. Cyan concluded that this was the other reason for acrimony and that neither faction had been particularly careful to direct discussion away from unnecessarily inflammatory comments or to express respect for opposing views.
     • Two households, both alike in dignity... -- WormRunner
       • LOL.  :-) RickK 04:48, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

January 2004 summary

This is a summary of Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion for January 2004. See also January uncut.

1. Jimbo wants VfD gone
   • To kick off the first fight of the new year, Jimbo made the suggestion on the mailing list that VfD was "completely broken". RickK claimed he would never delete anything again and an anon tried to spark debate by bringing up issues of deletionism and groupthink. Onebyone cut him down with the comment "I take it that by vanilla mainstream / groupthink you mean verifiable and neutral?". Angela claimed Jimbo was wrong as he had made his comment in the context of believing that Palestinian views of the peace process had been deleted, which it had not. She announced VfD was a wonderful place, with poor articles being saved as a direct result of being listed. PMC backed this up with examples. Another anon popped up to say he was horrified at the squabbling and that VfD was somehow to blame for the over-representation of Rambot articles.
2. Let's get rid of VfD
   • Theresa suggested that pages should be cleaned up, not deleted as it was off-putting for newbies. She was glad that pages were being moved to Wikibooks instead of being deleted but less pleased that sysops were deleting pages based on a majority rather than a consensus. She made some suggestions for new pages as an alternative to VfD. Angela pointed out that these pages already exist at Wikipedia:deleted test, Wikipedia:Things to be moved to Wiktionary and M:Transwiki. Fuzheado said the only alternative to VfD was carnage. Dpbsmith suggested that instead of VfD we classify articles Slashdot-style so people could browse at -1 and see "asdf" pages if they wanted to. Angela recommended creating a page at Meta to discuss it further. Onebyone suggested linking junk pages to "Wikipedia:Complete garbage".
3. Proposal for a New VfD System
   • Optim proposed a new VfD based on Taylor's Scientific Management principles which would punish people for proposing to delete a page that was not later deleted and pay them some sort of wikimoney for good deletion decisions. Only users with enough "money" would be given a vote. He added that the goal of VFD is to prevent trolls and vandals from destroying Wikipedia and clarified that VFD should exist but not be overused and reminded us all of the importance of WikiLove and WikipediAhimsa. Angela felt that punishing newbies for not understanding how Wikipedia policies apply to articles to be deleted was probably not the way to go. Meelar agreed that VfD is overused but saw Optim's proposal as harmful for new users and overly complicated. He recommended pages go to cleanup before VfD. theresa knott found this a sensible idea. Finlay McWalter noted that not only is VfD overused, it is also over-confrontational. His recommendations included gentler boilerplates, discussions on articles before they hit VfD, time on cleanup first, interwiki candidates to be listed elsewhere, and a split of VfD into a list of days with links to pages. Jiang was critical of the Wikimoney idea and saw no need to introduce capitalism to the process. He noted that cleanup was already an overused dumping ground. Optim reminded people that his suggestion was not meant to be taken seriously. ESP said that punishing people for trying to improve the quality of Wikipedia, however ignorant or misguided they may be, was probably not the best policy.
4. Headers and voting
   • Angela asked people not to add headers to every entry without reading the past discussion on them. Jiang noted that RickK had gone mad. He also suggested people ignore votes not accompanied by a reason. Lord Emsworth thought that much too complicated. Angela said that it was up to the person deleting the page to decide what weight to give votes without reasons. Delirium pointed out that the only person to complain about a deletion he'd made was The Cunctator. Texture explained that he was more likely to speak up if he disagreed with a deletion than if he agreed.
5. Democratize the deletion process
   • mydogategodshat's "Lets give the process back to the people" proposal aimed to make the process less time consuming and ad hoc by appending a form to every article which would allow people to give a score between 1 and 5. This would put deletion in the hands of all Wikipedians and be largely automated. Angela pointed in the direction of m:Deletion management redesign. unkamunka liked the score-based idea but queried the technical implementation of it. mydogategodshat thought that would simple enough.
6. Proposal for reform - deletion credits
   • In the fourth proposal in as many days, the now-banned user The Fellowship of the Troll (TFofT) said everyone should have deletion credits. Only those who had made enough contributions elsewhere would be allowed near VfD. Angela reminded TFotT that deleting pages was just a maintenance task, not some sort of wonderful privilege. PMC told TFotT that VfD was not a power game, and that it served a useful purpose in freeing the site from trash. RickK noted that TFotT seemed mysteriously knowledgeable about VfD for a newbie. Mark noted that such a system would prevent anons from voting. TFotT brought up groupthink once again and a long, and somewhat off-topic, discussion on the characteristics of groupthink ensued between him and Tuf-Kat, who thought the proposal was needlessly obtuse and not something that would reduce groupthink anyway. Delirium noted that whilst a lot of legitimate stuff is listed here, little of it is deleted. TFotT suggested everyone analyse the contributions of those voting. Onebyone said he wouldn't do this until TFotT demonstrated that the system was broken. Tuf-Kat wondered why TFofT didn't just ask a few people why they don't vote. TFotT thought that would not be credible enough.
7. Deletion policy
   • Elsewhere, Eloquence was plotting to split VfD into a voting page and a discussion page.
8. Proposal to limit edit conflicts and huge VfD page size
   • Not wanting to be left out of the "I made a VfD proposal" club, mav brought us this month's sixth proposal. This involved moving all discussion to the talk pages. The pros included limiting edit conflicts, increasing participation, making the page smaller, making it easier to find discussions and making it easier for admins to maintain the page. Downsides listed included the fact it was a new way of doing things, that it would not be possible to view the discussion on many topics all at once and that you would have to edit two pages to list an item. Optim thought discussions should go on /delete subpages but withdrew this when mav said that was too complicated. UtherSRG liked the idea and pointed out the {{subst:vfd}} would need to be changed. Angela suggested all new proposals be postponed until Eloquence's one had been voted on. mav said his proposal was more popular than Eloquence's, but that the two could be merged if necessary. ledgerbob asked if VfD could be automatically generated from a list of all pages with {{msg:vfd}}.Angela said it couldn't as you wouldn't know when things were ready to be deleted, so would have to check 60 different pages. Imran proposed splitting vfd by reason for nomination. Presumably people were fed up of proposals by this stage and no one replied. A user claiming not to be a troll popped up and asked not to be called a troll. Not wanting to be completely off topic, he also said VfD was too large.
9. No Sign of Discussion on "Explain your vote"
   • Finally, the discussion moved away from proposal making, and Jerzy objected to the idea one should give a reason for deletion along with their vote. Finlay McWalter agreed that voters should not be obligated to explain or defend their votes. Oliver P, however, disagreed and stated that the intention of VfD was to reach consensus, something not likely to be achieved by an uncommented vote. Onebyone said that articles already are only deleted if the admin perceives a need to and that nominations with no reason given, plus votes with no reasons given, should not be deleted. Anthony DiPierro argued that reasons to keep were not needed as all articles should be kept by default. Texture said that articles are kept by default and that exceptions are listed on VfD, hence reasons need to be given. Anthony DiPierro wanted to know what would happen if he didn't have any reason. Texture suggested he would be ignored and that he ought to refute the reason given to delete the page. Anthony DiPierro still did not see why a reason has to be refuted. Sam Spade (Jack Lynch at the time) thought that explanations were usually necessary. Angela told them all to stop arguing until the vote was over on Eloquence's proposal. Jerzy wondered if he could save some time by allowing someone to cast proxy votes for him.