Poor, Edmund W wrote: While that's often true, it's also often not. If some grad student puts his resume up, what are you supposed to do with it? Do we really need a stub saying "so and so is a first-year graduate student at the university of idaho; he has not yet published any papers or done any noteworthy research"? What about the case a few months ago where someone was making up characters supposedly from books that as far as anyone can discern don't actually exist? Malicious or just plain useless stuff like that really needs to go, and there's not much else you can do with it. And putting it on VfD is better than assuming it's crap and deleting on sight, because sometimes you turn out to be wrong and it actually wasn't crap, so it's nice to run it by people first to make sure. As far as stubbing things goes as well, I'm not that sure it makes much difference either way. If the submission was about a legitimate topic but a content-free submission, nothing's really lost by deleting it. Sure, you can undelete and stub it, but if it was content-free anyway, you could just as easily stub it from scratch without undeleting. It doesn't take too much research to write two sentences from scratch on most topics (a google search usually suffices). I'd personally rather just delete crap, and readd it later when someone has something contentful to write about it; there's thousands of potential articles to be written, so there's no reason we should be forced to write a particular one right now just because someone submitted nonsense with its title. Just delete it, and write it later if anyone feels like it (or write a different article instead; doesn't matter much either way). The main problem I see with not deleting crap is that it won't all get fixed for a while, and then the links will be blue instead of red. Instead of a source text, I'd much rather have a red link. The source text adds no content (it's easy to google for), so there's no advantage to having it on Wikipedia in the meantime until a real article gets written, and some disadvantage. -Mark

Ed Poor wrote in part: Ed, I'd like to hear more (on the list or by email) about how you find this tactic works for you -- especially given the cautious approach you take to most controversy. For example, do people get upset at your undeletions? Do you find yourself spending a lot of time researching good stubs to replace deleted text on articles that you'd otherwise ignore? And so on. -- Toby