On 10/13/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: Wait a few weeks then recreate being sure to establish notability. -- geni

On 10/12/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa(a)gmail.com> wrote: That's certainly the way it used to be, but this changed at some point: "This process should *not* be used simply because you disagree with a deletion debate's reasoning — only if you think the debate was interpreted incorrectly by the closer. This page is about *process*, not content." Not sure who added that, and whether or not there was a vote to completely change the undeletion process, but that's right at the top of the page now. Recreations of deleted pages without a VfU are One reason not to improve an article while it's under a VfD debate, unless you are sure it's going to win. I've seen a number of times when articles were improved significantly after most people voted, they were deleted based on those old votes, and now that newly improved content was speediable.

Seems to me that would contradict the current rules of VFU, which are simply about review of procedural due process. I have. What I got was banned from being allowed to edit VFU or any other page in the Wikipedia namespace. BTW, were the improvements mentioned in the AFD discussion so the I'm talking about a hypothetical here, but it's something that happens quite often. Sometimes the improvements are mentioned, usually they aren't. --Mgm Anthony

Which article are we actually talking about? If there's new additional evidence in the form of the Wayback machine links it explains why a regular Google didn't work which would make it quite likely for the original decision to be overturned. Especially when the creator has another comic included. --Mgm

Here's where the policy change was made, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_undeletion/Vf…23518465, on 20 September 2005. The edit summary was "Consensus has been reached, being bold." I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. Clearly there wasn't a consensus for this policy change, and I don't see a problem with being bold and reverting the change. Anthony

Bryan Derksen wrote: You can always write an article from scratch. If the assholes speedy it you'll have others on your side to restore it.

This doesn't make any sense. We need to change the policy if that is how it works. Fred On Oct 12, 2005, at 8:07 PM, Kelly Martin wrote:

On 10/12/05, Keith Old <keithold(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sure, it shouldn't. Wanna bet it won't be? Kelly

On 10/13/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam(a)inbox.org> wrote: It's not my job to seek out and destroy any who violates written policy. If, in fact, the written policy is not being followed because the consensus of the community is to ignore the written policy, then the written policy isn't actually policy, now, is it? I'm certainly not going to try to impose, as an Arbitrator, my opinion as to what deletion policy should be. That would be a gross abuse of power. Kelly

Anthony DiPierro wrote: I don't see it as that simple. There is the question of when does something change from a proposal to a policy. It is far too easy for incremental changes to policy to go unnoticed until they have become contrary to original intention. They only become noticed when someone tries to enforce them. It would indeed be wrong for him to impose what he thinks policy should be, but he still has to determine what policy is. That can be a matter of interpretation. He can also look into whether the policy adoption policy was followed to determine whether the policy is valid. Ec

Kelly wrote: Fred Bauder wrote: Yes, Fred is right. It is difficult to strike a balance here, though. It's one thing if Bryan Derkson (*Bryan Derkson*, this isn't some random person, it's *Bryan Derkson* you see) wants to recreate an article and puts forward good arguments for it, and another thing if some POV-warring troll or garage band tries to keep bringing back some nonsense that got properly deleted already. We should listen to Bryan, we should not listen to trolls. The hard bit is implementing common sense and logic in policy. :-) --Jimbo

Alphax wrote: Aw, shucks. I don't like to make a fuss, I just edit. On the other hand, Jimbo's post seriously inflated my head, there. Thanks. :) Relating back to the original purpose of this thread, though, I wouldn't want to dismiss the issue I had with this deletion by "being Bryan" and throwing my reputation around to resolve it. It just seemed like a particularly good example of a problem I felt existed with the current deletion-related policies, that there's no easy way to revisit a deletion that's been closed like this and to challenge votes made without any significant justification provided.

Alphax wrote: He He He! A bit of their own medicine. There could be a whole new level of argumentation. I would be happy with the simpler solution that any AfD without explanation could itself be speedied on sight. Ec

On 10/16/05 1:10 PM, "Bryan Derksen" <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: Why should there be a requirement that someone has to waste time by repeating the explanations given by other people for deleting an article? If an article is non-notable, it's non-notable. There is no requirement that anyone who votes has to write explanations for anything. When you have 150 AFD noms per day, it is absurd to suggest that there is some sort of obligation to explain votes, especially when so many nominations are uncontested junk. -FCYTravis @ en.wikipedia

On 10/16/05, Travis Mason-Bushman <travis(a)gpsports-eng.com> wrote: "Uncontested" != "junk" We just had an uncontested deletion of an article, and VFU was about to treat the application for undeletion with its usual feckless "the process was followed so keep deleted" idiocy. Yes, people who think that an article *must* be deleted *should* be required to explain why. Every single time. Why is this a problem? If this professor Wolters really had been such an inconsequential fellow, the article should have been redirect to the article about his college. If he was more important but still not for an article of his own then the article could have been merged. Why are we going around deleting articles like this? Why are people seriously suggesting that we're doing it in such numbers that nobody need even give a reason any more? That's utterly bonkers.

On 10/17/05, Keith Old <keithold(a)gmail.com> wrote: That's an editorial decision.

On 10/17/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa(a)gmail.com> wrote: However it does mean that for five days no one who visted the article thought it was worth keeping You don't think the template namespace is has enough rubish in it already? People move around Becuase aprently no one cares about them. Time use of course it would be fairly trival to create with {{agree}} (argee with nominator) so if comments were really required it wouldn't do any good. -- geni

On 10/17/05, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: The nominator in this case gave no reason except that he found this fellow boring and believed him to be non-notable. The former was very believable but obviously isn't a serious criterion for deletion. The latter would surely require some kind of rationale. Here we have a professor who has worked in Canada and Netherlands (not one of these merkin professors who are apparently not so senior) and a published author. We have a deletion precedent that (non-vanity) published authors are notable, and another that professors who have published books rather than just papers are notable, so the non-notability claim was, to put it mildly, somewhat implausible.

On 10/17/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: You relise the logical end point of that is that wikipedia has grown beyond our ability to manage it and needs drasticaly downsizeing? Even the most extream deletionists would probably feel that that was going a little far. I was refuring too the human habit of minimising expenditure of energy. Under the suggested changes we would end up with an impressive number of templates for voteing on AFD No you have already admited that not many people would care. What makes you think the redirects would be changed? ADF/[[wikipeida:wikiproject decency]] going on for thirty days? You do know that dissrupting wikipedia is a blokerble offence. I don't regard nn as useless so I have no problem with them amounting to the same thing. -- geni

geni wrote: You've interpreted my position to be exactly the opposite of what I was aiming for. I'm not saying "Wikipedia is big, so we should be shrinking it to make it easier to manage with our current methods". I'm saying "Wikipedia is big, so we should be changing our methods of managing it to cope with that." Oh, I see, this is in reference to your idea to explain votes using templates such as {{nn}} instead of just typing "nn". Well, I didn't propose that and in fact I think it would be a bad idea. So I guess we're in agreement here, for different reasons. I'm not sure what the problem here is, though. This is Wikipedia, the whole point is that the readers are also editors and so when they spot a problem they can fix it. If I follow a redirect and it takes me to the wrong place, I go back and change it. If nobody ever follows the redirect it won't get changed but it also won't _matter._ I edit plenty of articles about whose subjects I care nothing, BTW. The random article link is my browser's home URL and I click it whenever I'm bored with whatever else I was doing. Eventually someone else like me would stumble across trouble spots even if nobody really cared about them. I figured I was going to be accused of violating WP:POINT at some point in the course of this discussion. I was expecting that I'd have to actually make a related edit on Wikipedia itself before it happened, though, rather than just proposing an idea for a policy change. Voting just "nn" gives no reasoning _why_ the voter thought the article was nn. The point of AfD is supposed to be to have a discussion and reach a consensus, not just tally up votes and go with whichever side achieves the magic numeric threshold. If an article were to go up for deletion and fifty people voted "keep, notable!" but one person voted "delete, this is a hoax. See these websites [1][2][3], it was dreamed up by a radio shock jock in 2003 at WKRAP in New Serepta as part of a contest he was running." I would certainly hope that that one well-support delete vote would blow all fifty of those unsupported keeps out of the water.

On 10/18/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'd hope the article were kept, and changed to explain the hoax, since obviously it's a notable hoax. Anthony

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Bryan Derksen wrote: Good heavens no! That will upset people! You'll never be an administrator with such blatant direspect for consensus! - -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: You're right, it IS insane. But according to community consensus, due process is all that matters. Content be damned, we're here to run an internet democracy, not write an encyclopedia! - -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: Shh! You're not supposed to tell them that! :) - -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \

On 10/19/05, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: I agree totally. Wikipedia used to not be a democracy, but as it has grown it has become more and more democratic. I should mention that I don't mean a pure democracy, but rather democracy in the sense of "run by the people, possibly through elected representatives". What the arb committee says basically goes, and the arb committee is mostly elected. Yes, the board has the power to override the arb committee in theory, and the majority of the board is not elected, but so far that distinction has not actually come into play (I think). -- Anthony

On 10/20/05, JAY JG <jayjg(a)hotmail.com> wrote: Who would that be? -- Michael Turley User:Unfocused

On 10/20/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa(a)gmail.com> wrote: Actually, the point I was after is that it's those who want to make it easier to delete articles and reduce review are the ones trying to turn Wikipedia into a democracy, which is opposite of what Jay's email implied. I don't know anyone who's actively trying to further democratize Wikipedia who is also in favor of keeping more marginal articles. side of those who prefer deletion of the unfamiliar over accomodation of broad topics. -- Michael Turley User:Unfocused

Straw man arguments deserve similar responses. Stating that VFU is a check of proper process does not imply that "we're here to run an internet democracy, not write an encyclopedia!" Jay.

On 10/20/05, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: I never asked for copyright infringments to be made more accessible. Actually I think they should be made less accessible. --

On 10/20/05, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'd gladly write the code if there is policy in place to implement it. -- Anthony

Very true. That is why I have many times contemplated writing an hourly cron script that votes "Keep, this article is notable" on each and every article on AfD. I have always assumed that such behaviour would be frowned upon. But if it is as you say, that the deletionists doesn't waste too many neutrons/vote, then why should I? I'm pretty sure I could have this script completed before tonight... I'm very sure that there are alot of other rabid inclusionists out there that would also like to script-vote... Yes, this IS a threat. -- mvh Björn

That's the whole point, if there's a Wayback Machine link that shows it was popular there's enough justification for undeletion, but if justification with extra info wasn't required all deletions would be contested by people who are trying to get something into Wikipedia for their own purposes rather than creating an encyclopedia. A safeguard is needed. --Mgm

On 10/13/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com> wrote: In practice a completely new article may get a little opposition, but it isn't at all speediable and if speedied can be unilaterally undeleted. Another strategy is to merge the information into another article and recreate as a redirect. That would be impossible to misrepresent as a recreation.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: Unfortunately, people seem to think that AfD is Perfect and that you can't undelete if the AfD was "valid"; I've seen several votes on VfU simply saying "Keep deleted, valid AfD". What AfD (and VfU) needs is a swift kick in the pants. And possibly the bloc voters need one too. - -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \

Well, we don't want really crappy stuff put up over and over, but when something decent comes along we don't want automatic deletion. Perhaps a rule that after a year any article could be recreated? Fred On Oct 13, 2005, at 3:51 AM, Alphax wrote:

On 10/13/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: Surely there are other ways to approximate compliance with the GFDL other than the history maintained by Wikipedia. But in any case, the edit history of deleted articles is already available.

On 10/13/05, Bryan Derksen &lt;bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca&gt; wrote: Well, like I said, the edit history of deleted articles is already there. In case you didn't understand what I meant, when you click on "history" there will be a link which reads "View X deleted edits<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Undelete/Ria_Fulton>?" and clicking on that will provide you with the history information (anyone can see the edit history, not just admins). Furthermore, history only undeletion is allowed without a vote anyway (at least, it was last time I checked, a few months ago). Finally, it's really not that hard to copy/paste the edit history into the talk page, and that approximately fulfills the GFDL requirements as well as any other system being used on the wiki. I really think you're getting all worried over nothing.

On 10/13/05, SPUI &lt;drspui(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Just because admins *can* do something doesn't mean they have to. On [[Wikipedia:Undeletion policy]], it says ""History only" undeletions can always be performed without needing to list the articles on the votes for undeletion page, and don't need to be kept for a full ten days. Article histories that include copyright violations<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_problems>… not be undeleted." Of course, this is the same page gives a reason for undeletion saying: "Article wrongly deleted (ie that Wikipedia would be a better encyclopedia with the article restored). This may happen because they were not aware of the discussion on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion>… or Wikipedia:Miscellaneous deletion <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellaneous_deletion>(MD), or because it was deleted without being listed on AFD, or because they objected to deletion on *bona fide* grounds but were improperly ignored."

On 10/13/05, Bryan Derksen &lt;bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca&gt; wrote: Fair enough. In this case typing "based on deleted article by Oleg Alexandrov and Hahnchen" into the edit summary wouldn't be so hard though :). You could even give credit to Mr. 12.214.62.234 <http://12.214.62.234>if you care. And now that I look at it, Oleg and Hahnchen seem to have only removed information, so they don't have to be credited anyway. So all that's left is Mr. 12.214.62.234 <http://12.214.62.234>. I don't think the GFDL requires us to credit an IP address. But yeah, it's the principle of the thing, I guess. Incidently, is the information about the authors of the deleted versions kept in a part of the database that might get cleared out? I'd hope not, but now that you mention it maybe it is. I agree, but it really has nothing to do with GFDL attribution requirements. Anthony

The GFDL only requires the title, the name, the year, and the publisher, in the section entitled history. So yeah, they're useless, but they give some semblance of GFDL compliance. Ec Anthony

Han Dao wrote: But it's not a case that "Wikipedia doesn't want this article", because Wikipedia isn't a monolithic entity with one opinion. I personally believe that every web comic with at least a hundred strips or so (as a very rough benchmark) deserves an article. Webcomics are somewhat of a specialized subject for an encyclopedia, sure, but Wikipedia is capable of specializing in _everything_. Well, there's been arguments put forward that this sort of thing is a "fork" that does indeed harm Wikipedia (and perhaps the forked wiki too) by subjecting both to contributor drain - if the two wikis were merged they'd each have more people working on their contents. I'm not so sure about this, but I nevertheless think it's probably a net loss to be deleting content from Wikipedia that's perfectly acceptable for other encyclopedias to cover. But in any event, it's still only tangentally related to the issue that really bugged me here - that a small handful of voters could cast votes with paltry or nonexistant justifications given for them, and then that decision becomes very difficult to argue afterward. The whole "what is notable, and should notability matter" issue is another ball of wax.

Actually...we don't let everything get in. Only webcomics article get in. Those vanity article tends to get edited into a encyclopedic article. We even have a vague editorial policy like all article must be in NPOV. I have a problem with those creators who create vanity article. Thier article completely sucks, and self promoting, and I have to clean up their freaking mess almost everyday. We don't let commerical adversiting in there, spaming our encyclopedia with 100+ characters pages that have no purpose (In one incident, I deleted more than 100 articles relating to every single comic strips of Gaming Guardian.) Litterally any webcomics stuff can get in if they are real unless they just plain grabage not worth editing, irrevleant, orginal research, a review, hoax, etc. On 10/16/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm &lt;macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: