[WikiEN-l] Rampant Deletionism

Fri Nov 7 00:26:49 UTC 2003

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Rick wrote:
>
>>I included Talossan language on VfD because the article, as written,
>>was nonsense.  It has since been modified to make it a legitimate
>>topic.  VfD frequently serves such a useful purpose.  Putting the
>>title on "Articles needing attention" is useless, because nothing EVER
>>gets fixed that's on that page.
>>
>
>Well, that's a valid concern, but perhaps this merely suggests that we
>should, as a community, strongly de-emphasize the VfD page, strongly
>de-emphasize deletions, and instead hang out on "Articles needing
>attention".
>
I agree.  Wikipedia must be well carpeted, if we judge it by the 
opportunites that we have for people to sweep things under them :-)

This line of inquiry begs the question, "How do we make 'Articles 
needing attention' more functional?"  That list does just keep getting 
longer.  Also if I follow a link from there, I'm often left wondering 
whether it has already been fixed, or maybe it shouldn't have been on 
that list in the first place.  Encouraging people to go there and take 
time to actually deal with an article of their choice could bring the 
length of the list down.  We perhaps need to update the page that 
advises newbies about what they can do to contribute so that they can 
easily go to "Articles needing attention"

Ec