[WikiEN-l] Re: VfD etiquette

Mon May 31 11:57:14 UTC 2004

Jeeee, I totally agree with this... It is very important not to upset 
people, in particular newbies. We easily forget this.

I must also say that a couple of times, I have been myself a bit 
agressive, precisely because I felt this lack of etiquette toward the 
contributor :-(

Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
> On the Internet, one must be constantly aware that discussions that 
> "feel" as if they are taking place in a club-like atmosphere of a few 
> dozen people are, actually, completely open to the public. (The Pentagon 
> does not need to log my USENET posts in any Total Information Awareness 
> program; Google News, and Deja News before it have already done that!).
> 
> In Votes for Deletion, conversations are sometimes conducted as if they 
> were taking place behind a contributor's back, with the sillier items 
> being openly sneered at and ridiculed. A lot of these remarks are 
> actually witty, e.g. "Delete this before his vanity develops an event 
> horizon" or "Delete. Delete fast. Delete ruthlessly. (this has nothing 
> to do with the [actual content], but I can't stand it when people use 
> 'principal' when they mean 'principle')"
> 
> Unlike a closed-door executive session, these frank discussions are not 
> only taking place in public, but the contributor has been 
> all-but-invited to them by the placement of the VfD notice. Moreover, 
> the contributor may not arrive until a number of remarks have 
> accumulated or may not choose to announce his presence immediately.
> 
> In the case of the "event horizon" remark, there was actually a nice 
> symmetry, because the subject of the article had a weblog, _linked from 
> the article,_ in which _he_ was making rude remarks about the people who 
> were trying to get his article deleted.
> 
> Although the edit submission page warns that contributions be "edited 
> mercilessly," I do not believe that it is clear to a newcomer that the 
> seemingly wide-open opportunity to add a page is coupled with the 
> possibility that the page will be deleted. (This has recently been 
> addressed by a paragraph on "notability" on the 
> Wikipedia:Tutorial_(Keep_in_mind) page). I am sure that there are many 
> people who semi-innocently think that an encyclopedia page with a 
> friend's bio is a pleasant and amusing gift&mdash;rather like having the 
> International Star Registry name a star for them, only it's free. And I 
> am sure there are many pushy self-promoters actively looking for fresh 
> walls on which to paste their posters who do not see any "Post No Bills" 
> notice. Trickiest of all, as with USENET, I sometimes see submissions 
> that give me the impression being of well-meaning efforts from people 
> whose social and/or communications skills are marginal.
> 
> In reality, discussions on VfD _need_ to be frank and often critical, 
> and having a page undergo the VfD process must be enormously 
> ego-bruising, and there is probably not a lot that can be done to soften 
> the process.
> 
> But, particularly in VfD, discussants should maintain an awareness that 
> the contributors whose items are being discussed are quite likely to be 
> newbies, and are quite likely to be _present_.
> 
> --
> Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net 
> alternate: dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
> "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
> Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
> Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/