On 12/10/05, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
That's an abuse of AFD per the increasingly
decorative policy. It's
explicitly not for editorial work.
One of my long-standing beefs with the deletion process is that people
use it as cleanup, and when you call them on it, they say "But doing
it this way gets results under the threat of deletion, while if you
list something on cleanup, nothing ever gets done."
And then people turn round and say that if anything's ever deleted
through AFD, the topic is never again allowed to exist, even if the
reason for deletion was that it was a crap article that needed
cleanup.
([[WT:AUM]] is currently trying to form a local
consensus that supersedes computer
science with voting, so it must be a good idea.)
More accurately, they can see the positive effects of getting creative
with templates, while the negative effects are invisible on the small
scale and thus easy to ignore.
The discussion we should be having is one of "Should we extend
template syntax in order to allow more clever things to be done in a
sensible, maintainable way that won't impact system performance?"
Ugly template hacks to do logic and programs are not really the way to
go there.
-Matt