[WikiEN-l] Rampant Deletionism

Fri Nov 7 20:37:09 UTC 2003

I understand your point, and partly I also share it. However, your
proposed solution would work only in a minority of cases. It would work
for sub-stubs or articles that don't really talk about the subject they
claim to talk about. It would not work for the majority of articles on
VfD, though. Because they are put up not for being bad articles, but
because the person putting them up does not believe there should be an
article on the subject involved at all.

15 minutes or half an hour might have been enough for Khym Chanur to
write an article on "THEOS Multi-User Basic programming language",
although from what he wrote, he seems to have thought about it and have
reasons to be against it. But no amount of work would make Joseph
Lovero a person worth an encyclopedia article to Delirium. Nor would
it have helped me finding anything on Abek (since I am still convinced
it does not exist, at least not in anything like the form described in
the article), or enabled Maximus Rex to write a corrected list of
participants of World War IV.

I guess cases like the one you are talking about would better be put
at Cleanup; I would propose to move them to Cleanup when they appear
on VfD, and to delete them rather than put them on VfD if they have
been long on Cleanup with several deletion votes. The longer period
of Cleanup seems useful for these cases.

Andre Engels

"Ray Saintonge" <saintonge at telus.net> schrieb:
> Rick wrote:
> 
> > Why can't you just indicate on VfD why you think the article is valid? 
> >
> Because it requires us to spend time at VfD when we could be doing 
> something useful.  The most useful contributors are busy contributing. 
>  Hurrying them to improve the article in question within seven days 
> means they have to take time away from what they do best.  If they are 
> interested in the subject matter they'll deal with it according to their 
> own timetables, and not when some deletionist tells them to.
> 
> Some of us like to consider our votes carefully.  If it takes five 
> minutes each to consider each of a dozen articles that might appear on 
> VfD on a given day that's an hour of time spent just deciding on votes, 
> and the article itself is still unchanged.  Even when the result of a 
> vote is unquestionably in favour of deletion, and the article is 
> deleted, we are no further ahead; we're just back at the point where we 
> were before that article was written.  
> 
> We are all limited in the amount of time that we can contribute. 
>  Consider even some of our most severe edit wars, and I would suggest 
> that at any given time the number of people directly involved is fairly 
> small.
> 
> If somebody who is considering an article to be added to VfD instead 
> took 15 minutes to half an hour researching and improving that article, 
> it would save everybody's time, and Wikipedia would end up with a 
> something rather than a nothing.