On Sun, 06 Mar 2005 13:47:37 +0800, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gawab.com> wrote:
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]])
The difference, my friend, between policy and convention, is that the
former is transparent, is rational, and is decided by consensus,
whereas the latter is transient, opaque, often irrational, and decided
by majority/plurality. A good policy is applied equally to all
articles that fall under its remit, whereas convention follows the
whims of its constituents. I'm sure there are enough people that don't
like any particular article to vote for its deletion. It's only the
choice of sample that decides the outcome. And personally, I do not
hold much faith and the self-selecting sample that is VfD.
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.
It's hard to know where to begin here. How could a nomination be
valid, without a rationale? This doesn't grok at all for me, and
moreover, troubles me slightly. An editorial judgement it is indeed,
and a consensus of 5-7 (arbitrary guess there) is not qualified, in
this writer's humble opinion, to make editorial decisions for
something that has nearly half a million articles and hundreds of
thousands of users. Those who frequent VfD, as I mentioned earlier, as
not representative of the whole Community, and it's rather audacious
for any size proportially sized group to claim to be. And lastly,
isn't this thread an example of the community saying it is
unreasonable, and speaking for itself.
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 we're agreed here. It is about geting rid of nominations where
the nominator, in addition to being too lazy to improve the article to
something which can be built upon, is also too lazy to show why it
should be deleted. Shall we just have a voting system for all
articles, as you say, it's just an editorial decision. Let's let the
community decide by voting,... Also, I think we need to vote in a new
lead developer </glib>
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.
I don't think your idea of unreasonable nominations, as shown by this
post, is quite as extensive as some people's. On the ridiculous size
of VfD however, we are fully agreed. The implimentation of this
proposal would in part solve that problem.