[WikiEN-l] David Gerard's proposal is essentially a "speedy KEEP"

Sun Mar 6 02:58:23 UTC 2005

As I understand David Gerard's proposal, an individual sysop (is it 
meant to be limited to sysops?) could remove a VfD discussion if he 
personally judged that a) the nominator had not stated a reason, or 
that b) the nominator's stated reason was not listed in the written, 
codified deletion policy, or c) the nominator's stated reason WAS 
listed but did not actually apply to the article.

c) is the big one, but it must be implicit in his proposal. Otherwise 
every nominator would protect their nomination simply by intoning "No 
potential to become encyclopedic."

Thus, his proposal is essentially that sysops be empowered to perform a 
"speedy KEEP."

Speedy deletes are acceptable because most Wikipedians feel that the 
criteria are well-defined and that sysops can be trusted to execute the 
speedy deletion criteria properly.

IF we thought the general deletion policy was equally well defined, we 
wouldn't need VfD. We could just empower sysops to execute on the full 
deletion policy. Problem solved.

The fact that we _don't_ do this proves that we _don't_ think the 
deletion policy is well enough defined to entrust sysops to act on it 
as individuals, without soliciting community consensus.

So, turning the process around isn't going to be acceptable either.

If we can't trust individual sysops to speedy-DELETE articles that fall 
under "What Wikipedia is not," then we can't trust them to speedy-KEEP 
articles that don't.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"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/