[WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

Thu Sep 8 22:45:30 UTC 2005

On 9/6/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Snowspinner (Snowspinner at gmail.com) [050906 06:07]:
>
> > is a fork. This is good people taking their ball and going home,
> > because of the toxic culture on VfD.
> > We blew this one.
> 
> Tch! And I remember you ranting on IRC about how rude the inclusionists
> were on VFD and how the deletionists would never be so obnoxious ...
> 
> Note, by the way, that the spurious deletion criteria for webcomics is a
> symptom of the spurious criterion of "notability". Which has repeatedly
> been rejected as policy.

Part of the problem is that we don't currently distinguish between
criteria which do not change and are not useful to anyone ("nonsense,
vandalism, or unverifiable statements,") and things which change over
time, or are useful to a small audience ("non-notable, needs massive
cleanup, or unencyclopedic").

Should we distinguish these, we could tell the rest of the world not
to index or give search-engine juice to the latter set of articles,
without deleting them.

There are dozens of small towns around the world setting up their own
local wiki projects to document every location and aspect of their
town.  I would like to see Wikipedia encourage that.  We shouldn't
have to fight over this month's notability standards to let them
create useful, verifiable, neutral information within Wikipedia,
rather than on a separate site that may not know anything about free
licenses or how to run a public wiki.

+SJ

> I move:
> 
> 1. VFD or AFD or whatever it's called be shut down entirely. No article
>    deletion other than CSD, copyvios and similar. VFD is sufficiently
>    damaging that *nothing at all* would be better than it existing in
>    any present form.
> 2. A month to discuss new deletion mechanisms. 1 should get the keen
>    deletionists very interested indeed.
> 3. A vote. Nothing passes with under 75% support.
> 
> 
> - d.
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> 

-- 
++SJ