[WikiEN-l] Votes for deletion and due process

Wed Aug 20 09:00:37 UTC 2003

Nicholas Knight wrote:
>And these written policies are apparently developed 
>in back rooms with no input from the community. 
>Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly 
>against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the 
>unwashed masses. 

No, they are almost always developed in the open by documented consensus and 
by people who reasonably and in good faith interpret and codify our best 
practices. It is my opinion, whoever codified this rule was writing down the 
best practice of leaving deletion notices on articles to be deleted, because 
doing so is in the spirit of our (largely unwritten) polices of openness and 
transparency.  Otherwise some authors may not know why their article was 
deleted. We aren't talking about a lot of work here compared with the 
potential avoidance of needless ill will. 

For example, an article called [[Fumocy]] was recently listed on VfD without 
having a VfD notice placed on the article. A week passed and nobody spoke up 
for the article. I noticed that this apparently well-researched article was 
listed and I tried to confirm the title; I couldn't. I then tried to confirm 
some of the information on the page; I could. Apparently the author (a 
professional astronomer) and a few of his friends wrote the article using a 
brand new term for "full moon cycle" that is not yet (nor may never be) 
accepted by the scientific community. 

Luckily instead of deleting the article I moved it to the author's userspace 
and then later found out all the details. The author, however, was a bit 
miffed that there wasn't /any/ notice left on the article that it was about 
to be deleted; if a notice had been there, then anybody who knew about the 
subject could have argued for keeping the article based on the content 
(although the title is wrong). If however, I deleted the article, the author 
would not have known why, and the readers likewise would have been denied the 
opportunity to defend the article. That is, unless they read every entry 
submited to the VfD page; but who has time or want to do that?

IMO, the loss of even one article like this is worse than having 10 crappy 
articles slip by our destructo beams. Fairness sometimes requires a bit of 
work (of course, in retrospect, whoever wrote the policy to begin with could 
have provided a bit more by the way of informing everybody about it; if for 
no other reason to ensure that it is followed more-so than not).    

>What would have been wrong with the "admin" giving 
>some notice before he made what some view as a 
>unilateral policy change? Or would that have been too 
>inconvenient, since people might disagree?

And is it too inconvenient to leave a deletion notice on an article listed on 
VfD because somebody who actually cares about the article might disagree? Two 
way street. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) 