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

Sun Mar 6 05:47:37 UTC 2005

Rick wrote:

>--- Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>  
>
>>Take a look at the original proposal
>>itself, posted 
>>3/4/2005 10:12 AM:
>>
>>"Any VFD nomination not listing a reason in
>>Wikipedia:Deletion policy 
>>may be summarily removed from the page."
>>    
>>
>
>Exactly.  And "not notable" is not one of those
>criteria.  And yet it's one of the most commonly used
>reasons for listing an article.
>
>RickK
>  
>
I absolutely agree with Dpbsmith. Policy is meant to change with the 
community, not vice-versa. As much as some of us would like to avoid 
voting using highly subjective grounds like notability (which has 
different meanings from person to person; my idea of notability seems 
highly inclusionistic compared to some of the notability grounds used in 
voting today), the fact remains that a good deal of the community *does* 
use notability as a reason for deletion. If the community wants an 
article to go, we shouldn't disregard their opinion just because it's 
based on something subjective, since the resolution of the issue of 
contention -- should the article be deleted? -- has been agreed upon. 
(taken with a slight modification from [[Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy]])

I don't think removing nominations from VfD that are without a reason 
found in the deletion policy is a good idea. If the nomination has no 
specific rationale in itself, that might be acceptable, but non-notable 
is often used as shorthand for not encyclopedic. It's basically an 
editorial judgement - it's like a shorter version of "I don't think this 
topic is sufficiently encyclopedic enough to merit its own article in 
this encyclopedia". A nomination to delete should not be discarded 
wantonly. If it's unreasonable, the community will speak for itself, and 
that's much better than letting someone unilaterally make the decision 
that the nomination is bullshit.

I agree something has to be done about VfD's size, though. I just don't 
feel this is the right solution; rather, it more feels like a disguised 
attempt to lead us down the slippery slope of discarding votes simply 
because they just said "Delete. Non-notable." Regardless of the reason 
given, as I stated in the first paragraph, it's still an editorial 
decision that does not need extensive justification: An editor feels the 
topic does not merit an article. That opinion is factored into the 
decision by the community as a whole.

I think what should be done is to get the community more involved in VfD 
by reducing its size and providing more avenues for categorisation of 
articles being nominated for deletion. A professional aviator, for 
example, would be interested in VfD nominations relating to aviation but 
not scuba-diving. And so on. Likewise, a lot of articles are often 
deleted unanimously or nearly unanimously, and end up cluttering VfD, 
making it difficult for editors get to the heavily debated nominations. 
[[Wikipedia:Categorized deletion]] and [[Wikipedia:Preliminary 
deletion]] are both proposals that should be considered and discussed 
more; if people aren't satisfied with them, nothing's stopping them from 
making suggestions.

VfD's problem is not people making unreasonable nominations (those are 
already easily removed because we still have a smattering of editors 
being bold enough to use common sense). VfD's problem is it's too large 
for the community to easily vote. Solve that, and the problem of 
trigger-happy nominations will be easier to handle.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])