Lauri Love (nsh) wrote:
On Sun, 06 Mar 2005 13:47:37 +0800, John Lee
<johnleemk(a)gawab.com> wrote:
I absolutely agree with Dpbsmith. Policy is meant
to change with the
community, not vice-versa. As much as some of us would like to avoid
voting using highly subjective grounds like notability (which has
different meanings from person to person; my idea of notability seems
highly inclusionistic compared to some of the notability grounds used in
voting today), the fact remains that a good deal of the community *does*
use notability as a reason for deletion. If the community wants an
article to go, we shouldn't disregard their opinion just because it's
based on something subjective, since the resolution of the issue of
contention -- should the article be deleted? -- has been agreed upon.
(taken with a slight modification from [[Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy]])
The difference, my friend, between policy and convention, is that the
former is transparent, is rational, and is decided by consensus,
whereas the latter is transient, opaque, often irrational, and decided
by majority/plurality. A good policy is applied equally to all
articles that fall under its remit, whereas convention follows the
whims of its constituents. I'm sure there are enough people that don't
like any particular article to vote for its deletion. It's only the
choice of sample that decides the outcome. And personally, I do not
hold much faith and the self-selecting sample that is VfD.
Exactly. However, the solution is not to assume bad faith by discounting
votes/nominations that don't provide a rationale directly from the
deletion policy. The solution is to make VfD more accessible to the
community as a whole instead of some backwater where only those with
enough time and a fast connection can vote. Also note that word *does*
spread if there is strong contention over an article's status. I do not
vote or intently follow VfD (I do survey it occasionally though), but I
can easily point you to the Ashlee Simpson scandal not too long ago
where there was a lot of debating and a lot of votes, coming from every
side. Word *does* get around.
Also, convention should be policy should be loose. Tight policy is a
very bad thing, for two reasons:
1. [[m:Instruction creep]]. Tightly controlling what people do is a
bad thing and goes against the wiki spirit that relies on editors
to [[be bold]].
2. Gaming of policy. Again, the Ashlee Simpson scandal. Also, the
case over constant reversion of [[Charles Darwin]] (which happened
to centre on the bit of trivia regarding that Darwin and Abraham
Lincoln share the same birthday). In both of these cases, due to
the rigid policy of the 3RR (which most of us accept as a stop-gap
measure; a better one would simply say "Reverting non-vandalism is
generally a bad idea"), two editors got into very deep trouble.
Rigid policy is a bad, bad thing. As Dpbsmith pointed out on [[Wikipedia
talk:Votes for deletion]], what's stopping someone from removing votes
not conforming to the policy in detail (i.e. "Delete. Advertosing",
which clearly means that the article is "advertising", making it
deletable). As it is now, convention on VfD is that we vote using our
heads and not policy.
I don't think removing nominations from VfD
that are without a reason
found in the deletion policy is a good idea. If the nomination has no
specific rationale in itself, that might be acceptable, but non-notable
is often used as shorthand for not encyclopedic. It's basically an
editorial judgement - it's like a shorter version of "I don't think this
topic is sufficiently encyclopedic enough to merit its own article in
this encyclopedia". A nomination to delete should not be discarded
wantonly. If it's unreasonable, the community will speak for itself, and
that's much better than letting someone unilaterally make the decision
that the nomination is bullshit.
It's hard to know where to begin here. How could a nomination be
valid, without a rationale? This doesn't grok at all for me, and
moreover, troubles me slightly.
A nomination isn't valid without a rationale. "Non-notable" is
accepted
by editors as a rationale. This rigid interpretation of policy makes it
fair for more gaming of the system by rabid inclusionists.
An editorial judgement it is indeed,
and a consensus of 5-7 (arbitrary guess there) is not qualified, in
this writer's humble opinion, to make editorial decisions for
something that has nearly half a million articles and hundreds of
thousands of users.
5-7 is not consensus. Nor is 14-7. Something like 30-7 is considered
consensus here. If the community is so divided that no clear decision
can be made (generally consensus is regarded as >80%), then the article
is kept, as no consensus for deleting it has been reached. The reason
the 80% rule isn't in policy is because it's a rule of thumb. Making it
exact would lead to, again, gaming of the system: "Hey! I want this
article undeleted because my tallying indicates only 79.7% of the votes
were for delete!"
Those who frequent VfD, as I mentioned earlier, as
not representative of the whole Community, and it's rather audacious
for any size proportially sized group to claim to be.
Exactly, but it works because as soon as someone spots something wrong,
the whole community is alerted.
And lastly,
isn't this thread an example of the community saying it is
unreasonable, and speaking for itself.
I think there are as many people opposing the proposal as there are
supporting it.
I agree
something has to be done about VfD's size, though. I just don't
feel this is the right solution; rather, it more feels like a disguised
attempt to lead us down the slippery slope of discarding votes simply
because they just said "Delete. Non-notable." Regardless of the reason
given, as I stated in the first paragraph, it's still an editorial
decision that does not need extensive justification: An editor feels the
topic does not merit an article. That opinion is factored into the
decision by the community as a whole.
I think we're agreed here. It is about geting rid of nominations where
the nominator, in addition to being too lazy to improve the article to
something which can be built upon,
You try Googling for an obscure topic with an article in poor English (I
once stumbled across an article about an Eastern European actor who had
few hits on Google. Upon listing it on VfD, people soon found out more
about the actor and were able to make it more clearer and give it better
context, so I withdrew the nomination).
Accusing active nominators of being lazy to expand an article seems like
a strawman, especially when you consider the status of article content
is not a valid reason for deletion. Editors don't go and flame the
nominator or remove the nomination from VfD, though. Instead, they
expand/rewrite the article and/or vote to keep it. Or, if it's beyond
all hope, they will vote to delete it. Generally, most voters of VfD do
provide reasons for voting; they may just not be in the policy.
That there is no specific order like "You must vote delete for and only
for one or more of the following reasons" is a good thing, because it
gives editors a free hand in making editorial decisions.
I recall the issue of article size last time when old browsers were a
bit more common; although policy dictated "YOU MUST TRIM THIS ARTICLE
BELOW 32KB!" not many people did. They might embark on trimming the
article and/or pushing it out to subarticles using [[wikipedia:summary
style]], but as long as the article was readable, nobody bothered.
Nobody freaked out when [[Singapore]] began pushing past 40kb (it's been
brought down now to 33kb) or when [[Mozilla Firefox]] was a whopping
65kb (it's also been brought down to a more reasonable size, but it's
still past 32kb).
As a result of this, the policy has recently been changed to reflect
editorial convention. Policy should always follow convention (it's even
documented somewhere on the site in a guide to writing policy).
is also too lazy to show why it
should be deleted.
People can tell whether the editor made an effort. Most nominations
aren't very long these days, just briefly pointing out the article's a
neologism, advertising, etc. I see no reason why non-notable, a widely
accepted shorthand for "not encyclopedic" should be different.
Shall we just have a voting system for all
articles, as you say, it's just an editorial decision. Let's let the
community decide by voting,... Also, I think we need to vote in a new
lead developer </glib>
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at.
I think what should be done is to get the
community more involved in VfD
by reducing its size and providing more avenues for categorisation of
articles being nominated for deletion. A professional aviator, for
example, would be interested in VfD nominations relating to aviation but
not scuba-diving. And so on. Likewise, a lot of articles are often
deleted unanimously or nearly unanimously, and end up cluttering VfD,
making it difficult for editors get to the heavily debated nominations.
[[Wikipedia:Categorized deletion]] and [[Wikipedia:Preliminary
deletion]] are both proposals that should be considered and discussed
more; if people aren't satisfied with them, nothing's stopping them from
making suggestions.
VfD's problem is not people making
unreasonable nominations (those are
already easily removed because we still have a smattering of editors
being bold enough to use common sense). VfD's problem is it's too large
for the community to easily vote. Solve that, and the problem of
trigger-happy nominations will be easier to handle.
I don't think your idea of unreasonable nominations, as shown by this
post, is quite as extensive as some people's.
Can you show me examples of unreasonable nominations? I have already
given three specific examples backing up my argument.
On the ridiculous size
of VfD however, we are fully agreed. The implimentation of this
proposal would in part solve that problem.
Not really. It'd just give rabid inclusionists more tools to legally
troll with.
John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])