[WikiEN-l] My view on deletions

Tue Jan 13 00:51:58 UTC 2004

>-----Original Message-----
>From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Jimmy Wales
>Sent: 12 January 2004 20:27
>To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] My view on deletions
>
>
>At least one person has privately expressed to me the opinion that my
position on deletions is that nothing should be deleted.  That's
absolutely not 
>true, and I thought that this misunderstanding might be widely enough
shared that I should speak to it for a moment.
>
>I think that the vast majority of deletions are perfectly fine.
Deletions for vandalism seem to be pretty well not abused.  Borderline
cases, with a
>fairly open policy, are sent to VfD now, and that almost always works
out just fine.
>
>But I'm unhappy with some deletions (and redirections) that happen on
VfD.  I call the process broken by analogy with hypothetical (and
virtually all
> real!) criminal justice systems that get the right answer most of the
time, but for various procedural reasons sometimes do exactly the wrong
thing.
>
>But in no way am I saying anything even remotely supportive of the idea
that vandals should be given free hand, nor that deletion or redirection
should
>always be avoided at all costs.  They are important tools, but we need
to improve how we use them.

In my experience mistakes occur much more frequently over "instant
deletion" pages rather than the VfD page. It's not a coincidence that
VfD decisions are made collectively and instant delete are made
individually. VfD mistakes are so few and far between (I think only the
Palestinian views... article has been cited in this discussion as a VfD
mistake and that is only debatably a mistake - given all our policies on
page-naming) that it is probably not worth your worrying about too much.
Instant deletion mistakes (in the sense that the page should've gone to
VfD or even cleanup rather than instantly deleted) are made on a (I
estimate) daily basis. A timely reminder to work the VfD process rather
than bypassing it by insta-deleting may be in order.

Pete/Pcb21