[WikiEN-l] No vote needed for obvious nonsense (was: Rampant Deletionism)

Sat Nov 8 21:28:58 UTC 2003

RickK> People like MyRedDice don't trust anyone to delete anything.

Ooh, name check! :)

I trust many people to delete many things. In particular, I'd like to compliment 
Angela, who always does stirling work managing votes for deletion, and has, in my 
eyes, an excellent grasp of consensus and wiki process. And there are of course 
many other people who do get work keeping the cogs of Wikipedia flowing - sadly, 
we only really notice them when the cogs get jammed, but I'd like to take this 
moment to register my appreciation for all their hard work.

RickK was responding to this comment by Ed Poor:

Ed Poor> We trust all our sysops to know what is "obvious nonsense" -
Ed Poor> it's one of the key criteria for becoming a sysop: you've been around
Ed Poor> long enough to show that you have good judgment.

As RickK said, I don't agree with this, though not for the reasons he gives. Different 
people have different ideas over what is "obvious nonsense", and with our current 
deletion system, I feel that Ed's approach would cause more problems than it 
solved. As people here know, I am one of the people who strongly feel that there are 
better alternatives to our current deletion system and I would like to give a quick 
plug (again) to:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/deletion_management_redesign

Our current "deletion policy" suggests a number of categories where deletion without 
listing on VfD is appropriate, including vandalism, test pages, and pages with no 
meaningful content or history. Although not uncontroversial, I think this approach is 
a good one - it doesn't eliminate judgement (that would be impossible), but rather 
provides a framework within which to exercise judgement.

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy

-Martin "MyRedDice" Harper