[WikiEN-l] Article deletion

Mon Sep 12 20:11:41 UTC 2005

On 9/12/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Spot on. Personally, I favour the PWDS because it would take deletion
> out the hands of the folk who just hang around on AfD, and quite
> possibly end the majority democracy which seems to be the norm on AfD.
> 
> Further, if deletion was in the hands of everyone, they'd have to
> reach a consensus - if they want to edit war over it, they're welcome
> to take 24 hours every fourth revert to reconsider their position ;-).
> 
> Of course, PWDS will never be installed, as the entrenched AfD zealots
> will never concede to any change that threatens their pastime.

Dan, you are one of the most vocal proponents of the PWDS.  Please
explain to me this: what  would we gain by having revert wars over
something, with blatantly obvious vandalism available in page
histories, rather than deleting outright?

This may be "pure wiki" and therefore desirable from a social point of
view, if you take the viewpoint that Wikipedia is a wiki as would
conventionally be seen.  I suggest, however, that many ideas about
wikis do not apply to Wikipedia because of the difference in scale and
therefore vandalism.

In the end, we are going to force discussions over the matter.  It is
conventional WP philosophy that edit wars are not good.  They attract
trolls and POV-pushers and, in the end, force a tyranny of the
majority, as the 3RR will always win.  However, the discussions would
essentially be AfD discussions about controversial articles.

So we are back where we started.

So I ask this:

1) What do we hope to gain by introducing PWDS?
2) How do we handle the vandals who will blank a page (as many already
do for vandalism) then to claim "but I was deleting the article"?

If the only reasons are ideological, I don't think PWDS is valid. 
Otherwise, I am open to persuasion.

Yours,
Sam