[WikiEN-l] Votes for deletion and due process

Wed Aug 20 13:18:59 UTC 2003

--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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. 

That's why I think we should just write the userpage
of the article. Usually, the articles at VfD only have
one author, if not the other authors only did
formatting edits (even if they didn't mark them as
minor). If you wrote a message to the author at the
beginning, it probably would have been solved faster
than writing it on the article. I think no
well-written non-copyvio article should be deleted
without contacting its main author, regardless of
whether a notice is placed on the article or not.
LDan

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