[WikiEN-l] VfD is broken

Sat Sep 4 11:10:56 UTC 2004

Good luck!!!!
It requires teaching people common sense.
Ec

Chris Wood wrote:

>- Yes, this is a rant, but please bear with me... it becomes less rant-like
>;)
>
>    See also the recent thread "Dartmouth follies".
>
>Votes for deletion have gone through the roof. At the start of August, the
>average number of pages voted for deletion per day was two. Now it is
>somewhere between 25 and 30, and I see no reason to expect this to stop
>increasing.
>
>Most of the articles are listed there for the wrong reasons. For instance,
>someone sees a badly written article - they list it on vfd. This page is
>useless without major expansion - vfd. A topic I've never heard of, and
>think is obscure - vfd.
>
>Articles are often voted for with little or no reason. Here's an example:
>"Simply not notable enough, I'm afraid."
>
>So what? As an example, one page being VfDed at the moment is about a club
>established in 1888, with many thousands of members (don't look for it, this
>is just an example). Why should the votes of 7 deletionists matter more than
>the thousands of people who may potentially look up the article? For that
>matter, why should the votes of even 100 Wikipedians matter, if the article
>is likely to be looked up by many people?
>
>The inherent bias of this page towards deletionism has been previously
>discussed on this list.
>
>It's pretty clear that VfD is going beyond it's original purpose, is wasting
>a lot of time for no good reason, and in many cases conflicts with other
>principles of Wikipedia. For instance, stubs are being deleted just because
>they are stubs, even though they are very expandable.
>
>I think it is clear that we need some tighter guidelines on reasons why
>something should be voted for deletion. I've originated a policy,
>Wikipedia:Importance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Importance),
>which attempts to establish some, and isn't doomed to failure like the
>previous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Fame_and_importance.
>Feel free to disagree with me, comment (*not* vote) and propose changes etc.
>at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia talk:Importance.
>
>I'm not so much trying to push my personal viewpoint here, as trying to
>establish consensus and stop people wasting their time. If the community
>decides "no articles about obscure topics", that's fine, but let's make that
>policy and not argue about it in a hundred different places over and over
>again. Let's not waste people's time by encouraging them to start articles
>on the one hand, and on the other deleting them because some other people
>think they're not important. Let's establish some common ground, and stop
>driving people away.
>  
>