[WikiEN-l] Re: Proposal on VFD: enforcement of nomination policy

Sun Mar 6 01:37:25 UTC 2005

David Gerard wrote:

> Rick wrote:
>
>> But that's not what's being proposed here.  What's
>> being proposed is, if anybody coming into the
>> discussion thinks that the reason for the listing
>> isn't acceptable, they can just delete it from the VfD
>> page.  Why not just let it run its course, and vote
>> Keep?  Because radical inclusionists are afraid they'd
>> lose the vote.  ~~~~
>
> No, I'm proposing it (not a strawman "radical inclusionist")
> because there's a shitload of nominations that have had *no
> listed rationale*. They're on the order of "I've never heard
> of it so it's not notable" - measuring the content of
> Wikipedia by their ignorance. They're nominations that, per
> the policy *shouldn't be there at all*, and make VFD
> unfeasibly long.

If this is the problem, it seems to me that a good way to deal with the 
problem is to correct only the problem at hand. Somehow this discussion 
has morphed into a debate that seems to some people like it's a major 
overhaul of VfD practice, which is guaranteed to fire up another round 
of the classic inclusionist/deletionist flamewar.

Quite simply, if articles are nominated for deletion with no 
justification at all, I think it's fine to remove them with no further 
inquiry. If the justification is shoddy, I would recommend asking for 
better reasons first, and then removing the listing later if they're not 
forthcoming. This shifts the responsibility for justifying deletion back 
where it belongs, and gives less appearance of short-circuiting the process.

For people using "not notable" or "not encyclopedic" as bare-bones 
justifications, I would suggest that they retrain themselves to 
elaborate a little bit more. By themselves, these are meaningless 
shorthand for "should be deleted" - we know that already, that's why you 
came to the page. Point out that you put in a little bit of effort to be 
confident that it doesn't belong. "I've never heard of it and couldn't 
find any evidence that anyone else has, either" will go a lot farther 
than "I've never heard of it so it must not be notable".

--Michael Snow