Jimmy-
Nothing about VfD is Policy with a capital P, laid
down or decreed by
me. It's just a social custom, no more and no less. If the VfD
process decides that an article like "Palestinian views on the peace
process" should be redirected or deleted, there's absolutely nothing
to prevent the next person who comes along from trumping the VfD
process by just editing the page.
And if they do so in a positive, co-operative, and
NPOV manner, then
Wikipedia will be the stronger for it. If they do so in a negative,
non-co-operative, and POV manner, then the Wiki process will work
again -- the article will get re-deleted, re-redirected, etc.
This doesn't sound like an encyclopedia to me - it sounds like a giant
dumping ground where anyone who spends enough time to defend their space
can keep it. It makes all the definitions of [[Wikipedia is not]] moot for
people who are reasonably nice (or, more realistically, sufficiently
persistent).
Without clear policies as to what material is allowed and what is not, and
without clear means to enforce these policies (that is, a deletion
policy), Wikipedia will develop into an Everything2-ish state. Thus you
eventually end up *needing* a Sifter project because Wikipedia will be so
full of crap that nobody takes it seriously. I prefer a model wherein
there are only articles which have at least the *potential* to be
brilliant prose. And when I say, "we have X articles", I would prefer not
to have to follow this up with increasingly cumbersome estimates as to how
many of these *really* qualify as articles.
Although you have in effect made a clarification that you think VfD is not
policy, this clarification is still buried somewhere in a mailing list
archive and will likely not be referred to by persistent trolls to justify
their crapflooding. (That's good!) Without such a declaration being
directly inserted into the respective pages, your view is also
unrealistic, however: Sysops treat VfD as policy. Users are told by sysops
that VfD is policy. Sysops *will* call for bans of users who try to
circumvent VfD. We even have a page called Wikipedia:Deletion *policy*.
So now you've made a bad situation worse:
1) VfD doesn't have a clearly defined process
2) VfD is treated by other pages and by sysops as policy
3) Jimbo says that VfD isn't policy
The potential edit wars and long-term conflicts that can result from this
fuzzy state make my head hurt. I know you value creative anarchy and
consensus building, but I think you also have to come to terms with the
reality that an encyclopedia requires clear rules that are actually
enforced to work. NPOV is such a policy, and I do not see a single good
reason why we shouldn't have a similarly strongly enforced inclusion
policy.
Regards,
Erik