I haven't had much time for Wikipedia stuff lately, but I've been watching the lists... the main reason I've refrained from several-day-delayed responses has been that Cunctator has said it better than I could. With this thread, it's very good to see Jimbo reminding people of the principles at work here. I've seen a distinct slide downward with VFD lately... a couple weeks ago, I decided that I would no longer vote 'delete' on any article. Which doesn't mean I voted keep on everything... only for those I felt had distinct value. I abstained from otehrs simply because there's already so many delete votes that will automatically appear for practically anything on VFD... An experiment I won't make because I hate when people do stupid things to prove a point, and I fear the point'd be proven: List everything on Brilliant Prose on VFD. See how many delete votes you get. It'd likely be a rather large number, with anything under 32K decried as a "useless stub" and "unencyclopedic", and over 32K as a "long and pointless ramble". Now, there's been discussion on [[Wikipedia_talk:Deletion policy]] about criteria for valid voting. This is discussed in a few ways, but there is a valid point that if there are going to be votes, there needs to be something to oppose "sock puppets"... now that the edit-count barrier dropped from 100 to 25, and the account is only required to have existed for one week, I don't have a particular problem with it. The 2/3s majority for deletion bothers me a lot, even if (as has been pointed out to me) there are very few articles that end up with votes in the range between 2/3 and 3/4 (which I consider much more sensible). The trouble is, there are relatively few people pushing for rules that restrict deletion- the majority of opinions on the matter seem to be interested in reducing barriers to deletion as fast as possible, putting the burden of proof on those defending an article... the second most vocal faction (and it's become disturbingly factionalized there) is those saying that it should all be a consensus thing, that any voting is evil, that one person should be able to block any action. Which I don't find terribly helpful. I've seen a lot of dodging of the "what does it hurt?" question, the most I've seen is "it DOES hurt" or "it doesn't belong in an encyclopedia". The first response isn't an answer, and begs the question to be repeated. As to the second... what do you define an encyclopedia as? LKWR is the only one I've seen outline criteria (back on 10/31), 4 of which describe Wikipedia excellently, and I disagree with the other 2. The issue is that when people say "encyclopedia" they tend to be referring to "paper encyclopedia", which is effectively all that's existed to date- all the big encyclopedias have CD and 'net versions these days, but they're just the paper with lots of pictures and some sounds and movies here and there: the people who work on those versions are specifically told not to put work into any text that won't go into the paper version (I have this from a friend who worked on Grolier's online edition, who informs me that the others do the same.). Wiki Is Not Paper. I strongly oppose use of things like "that's not what an encyclopedia is", because what are you using as a standard? F&W, Britannica, Grolier, something like that, yes? They're designed around what fits in paper- there's massive size constraints. A full print copy of Britannica is really, really big. (This is getting a bit long.) I'm going to propose again what I proposed once before: a temporary moratorium on deletions. Let's say two weeks. Copyvios will be the only exception. Blanking can be used if there's felt to be no value at all to the content, but if there's verifiable information in it, leave it. Let's try it and see what happens, hmmm? -- Jake

Vicki Rosenzweig wrote: to in Understandable, and not the sort of thing I really oppose... but for the duration of such a period, I'd prefer we try just blanking... or redirecting to [[Wikipedia:Dead End]] or somesuch, as was proposed once. Maybe replace with "(There is currently [[Wikipedia:Dead End|no text]] in this page)"? Page can be named whatever, I'm just going with a name someone used once before as an example. The idea being that whatever that page is, we can use the "What links here" afterwards and evaluate what of that should be deleted as junk. -- Jake

Rick wrote: nice how you can just pigeonhole all of the people who make frequent use of VfD into ONE category?) what useful purpose all of these steps serve. Funny, I don't think I used the word deletionist anywhere in what I wrote (the subject has it, but that's because I don't change subject lines in replies). I'm trying to avoid it. All of these steps? I proposed a few different possible actions, but under the one I currently favor, this is all the steps: 1. redirect to [[Wikipedia:Junk page]] 2. Check the 'What links here' on that page periodically to see if you see anything to be rescued. 3. post-moratorium, check the 'What links here' on that page and decide what to get rid of. I think that's equal to or less than adding it to VFD, adding a VFD notice to the page, and then dealing with VFD discussion. -- Jake

Rick wrote: Did someone call you or anyone else an idiot? If so, I want to strongly urge against that. And if no one said anything of the sort, and you implied it anyway, I want to strongly urge against that. For the record, I don't intend the labels "deletionist" or "completionist" to be pejorative in any way, nor do I think that we should use them in such a fashion as to fail to acknowledge significant differences among advocates of either side. --Jimbo

Except for those who say nothing should be deleted for six months. RickK Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote: Vicki Rosenzweig wrote: I don't think anyone disagrees with those deletions. I don't, anyway. --Jimbo _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard

Stan Shebs wrote: deletionists on Heh, that's almost exactly what I just wrote in reply to Vicki. Great minds think alike, eh? (ignoring the fact that the second half of that expression is "and fools seldom differ." for now) Maybe [[Wikipedia:Junk Article]]. -- Jake

Rick wrote: VFD is a nasty sucking void of attention. It seems like there's almost always at least two lists on it, for no other reason than that they're lists. Things like that. Looking at it today, it's not as bad as last week, though. Still, there's some things that just keep coming up. I want to try stopping it altogether for a couple weeks or so to give everyone a break from it and do other things... and to see what really happens. I'm not proposing an end to deletion, just that we try not doing it for a period and observe results. What's the harm? Blanking is a much more equal thing than deletion- anyone can do it, and people can still see histories if it's just blank. And deleted articles are "kept around", as well... just not where normal users can see them. -- Jake

Are you saying that those of us who think that VfD is useful are not contributing anything useful? What about people like Lir, who feel that those of us who want to add things to VfD should instead make the article somehow "bedtter" instead of garbage? Isn't that "taking time away" from what we do best? I'm sick and tired of being attacked as if what I'm doing on Wikipedia is somehow of lesser quality thatn what you and other people do. Am I not worth keeping around? Should I go away? RickK Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: Rick wrote: Because it requires us to spend time at VfD when we could be doing something useful. The most useful contributors are busy contributing. Hurrying them to improve the article in question within seven days means they have to take time away from what they do best. If they are interested in the subject matter they'll deal with it according to their own timetables, and not when some deletionist tells them to. Some of us like to consider our votes carefully. If it takes five minutes each to consider each of a dozen articles that might appear on VfD on a given day that's an hour of time spent just deciding on votes, and the article itself is still unchanged. Even when the result of a vote is unquestionably in favour of deletion, and the article is deleted, we are no further ahead; we're just back at the point where we were before that article was written. We are all limited in the amount of time that we can contribute. Consider even some of our most severe edit wars, and I would suggest that at any given time the number of people directly involved is fairly small. If somebody who is considering an article to be added to VfD instead took 15 minutes to half an hour researching and improving that article, it would save everybody's time, and Wikipedia would end up with a something rather than a nothing. Ec _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard

Jake Nelson wrote: My main question is that it makes Wikipedia look ridiculous, and makes information harder to find. If I search for "Michael Jordan" and get 4,000 results consisting of every person who has ever been named "Michael Jordan", that's *much* less useful than the current state, and a bit laughable. Wikipedia is not a geneological database after all. -Mark

Delirium wrote: For the record, I want to say that even though I don't agree with these two arguments, I think it's appropriate to say that these are good, non-straw-man arguments on the deletionist side. 1. Article on 'eternal ephemera' make Wikipedia look ridiculous 2. Articles on 'eternal ephemera' may make it harder to find the real articles I think that both of these can be answered, but that they are valid concerns. My essential answer is that articles on truely irrelevant topics are not likely to be seen by very many people anyway, and that if and when we have a problem with the search engine returning too many results, not properly prioritized, we can start to research ranking algorithms to ensure that well-linked mainstream articles show up first. --Jimbo

The Cunctator wrote: You are incorrect. -Mark

Again with the "straw man" attack. This is worthless as an argument, and all it does is to make any discussion worthless. RickK The Cunctator <cunctator(a)kband.com> wrote: On 11/7/03 3:23 AM, "Delirium" wrote: This is a straw man argument. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard

Delirium <delirium(a)rufus.d2g.com> wrote in part: The current path is not to keep doing what we have been doing before, but to continually improve our ways and means. To that end, I propose the following plan, which incorporates some features of suggestions made by (in alphabetical order--apologies to those who this always discriminates against): AndrewA, Angela, Jake, JamesDay, Jimbo Wales, Stevertigo, TakuyaMurata, Viajero (I know I am missing some folks.) Core-rules: 1. Wikipedia:Cleanup be separated into 7 weekday-specific files. 2. Each such file have subheaders indicating which week the listings are from. 3. No article be listed on VFD *before* it has spent *at least* three weeks on Cleanup. 4. No article be listed on Cleanup *longer* than 12 weeks. 5. No article be blanked without the content being moved to talk. Subsidiary recommendations: 1. Articles on Cleanup declared deletable include link to [[Wikpedia:threatened]]. 2. Articles on Cleanup declared stubby include link to [[Wikipedia:stub]]. 3. Articles on Cleanup declared otherwise troubled include link to [[Wikipedia:attention]]. 4. Articles on VFD include link to [[Wikipedia:endangered]]. 5. Articles on PNA include link to [[Wikipedia:difficult]] 6. Cleanup-Listings have score starting at -4; users can add or decrease the score by 1. 7. Listings also have deletability-score starting at +4; users adding or decreasing by 1. Fair warning, I may reply to my own message to annotate, expand etc. the above. Respectfully (as ever): Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (aka Cimon Avaro)

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: <something obnoxiously complicated> Gyahhh. I've been accused of coming up with obscure and complex procedures once or twice, and I've gotten used to them, but... gah. Sorry, but that's just not going to be readily explainable to people. I'll try to work out something, perhaps including bits... -- Jake

This is unworkable and can't be maintained. RickK Jussi-Ville Heiskanen &lt;jheiskan(a)welho.com&gt; wrote: 3. No article be listed on VFD *before* it has spent *at least* three weeks on Cleanup. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard

On 11/6/03 11:20 PM, "Delirium" &lt;delirium(a)rufus.d2g.com&gt; wrote: Note the "one would want to start with those that are collectively accepted as pivotal." I see the inclusion of the type of information you're discussing being something that eventually happens in the lifetime of Wikipedia, but not in any serious quantity any time soon; there would need to be improvements of the backend software, etc. E.g. when the Wikipedia at some point becomes self-aware and starts adding entries on its own. I really do go back to the reasonableness criterion. I *trust* you that if you reasonably believe that there should be an entry on one of your relatives, that you should be able to make it. A big control on all of this is that Wikipedia entries need to be linked from other entries. For example, one of my relatives is an influential computer scientist. There's an entry in Wikipedia on him. Nothing exciting there. The more contentious issue would be that if (when) more information is added to the entry, it would indicate that he was strongly influenced and inspired by an older relative who is less famous. A good entry on that person could then be written, discussing his various accomplishments, etc., using information that is freely available elsewhere. I understand that because everyone has parents, it would be "dangerous" to say that a mention of a person in Wikipedia is sufficient to allow an entry. I'm not advocating that. I am advocating trusting each other to be responsible in their efforts to contribute to Wikipedia, rather than try to erase each other's contributions and spin imagined scenarios of the imminent death of Wikipedia.