[WikiEN-l] Votes for deletion and due process

Wed Aug 20 17:14:42 UTC 2003

On Wednesday 20 August 2003 02:00, Daniel Mayer 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.

Documenting best practice is not the same as documenting policy. When a 
programmer writes code, best practice is to comment that code, but would we 
really want compilers enforcing it as policy?

> We aren't talking about a lot of work here compared with the potential
> avoidance of needless ill will.

Transferring the load merely transfers the ill will.

<snip story about a nearly-lost article>

This should provide more incentive to automate the process, no?

> 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).

"A bit more" ? There doesn't seem to have been *any* notice.

> >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 is precisely my point. If other people are expected to conform to a 
policy of openness that requires extra work, that policy should be set in an 
open way. This one was not.