New subject: Interpreting merge votes (was Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias)

19 Nov 2005

Sam Korn wrote:

...
 On 11/19/05, Bryan Derksen
&lt;bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca&gt; wrote:

 Isn't it? If an article gets one third
"keep" votes, one third "merge"
votes, and one third "delete" votes, the article gets kept. Even if an
article gets 100% merge votes, it's still "kept" - the old title gets
turned into a redirect and the information that was there gets moved
into an existing article the redirect points to. And this isn't a
binding forever and ever result like "delete" is, either, so the
material could eventually get split back out and moved to the old title
again one day if it grows enough to warrant it. I myself can think of
two cases where I merged articles after an AfD, complaints arose from
people who didn't like the resulting merged article, so I split the
material back out again to the original location and that was that.

I see "merge" as a vote to keep accompanied by a recommendation for how
to clean up the kept article afterward.

 Merge is a vote to merge. I don't see putting words into nominators'
mouths as acceptable.  If people vote merge, they aren't necessarily
giving anyone permission to enterpret their vote in any other way.

 Here's an illustration to clarify the point. Quite a few articles get 
deleted for inherently inappropriate subject matter, such as 
agenda-pushing conspiracy theories. Suppose someone writes [[Swiss 
incitement of the Paris riots]]. A nomination like this will normally 
see quite a few merge votes, as in "merge any verifiable information 
into the article about the recent civil unrest in France."

These merge votes are most certainly not votes to keep even a redirect 
at [[Swiss incitement of the Paris riots]]. The title is absolutely 
ludicrous and needs to be deleted, and these people realize that. 
However, they vote to merge out of concern that we salvage factual 
information that may not be in the real article, before deleting the 
bogus one.

--Michael Snow