[WikiEN-l] Article deletion

Tue Sep 13 15:53:33 UTC 2005

> On 12/09/05, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Revert wars wouldn't get very far due to the 3RR - it would force
> people to come to a *consensus* over whether or not to include an
> article, rather than just voting. I bet most deletions wouldn't be
> controversial (just as a lot of AfD listings aren't opposed). I don't
> see how having vandalism in page histories is a problem.

But you are advocating setting up a system that encourages
revert-warring.  Not good.  As in, NOT good.  Revert wars are bad. 
They encourage bad faith and aggression more than anything else
_including_ AfD/VfD.

> > 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.
> 
> I simply disagree!

Fair enough.  But would you agree that Wikipedia is _more_ than the
wiki as it was originally envisaged?

> > 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.
> 
> No, AfD doesn't have "discussions", it has simple majority votes. PWDS
> would force *discussion* over voting, as the power to delete/undelete
> would belong to everyone, therefore everyone would have to agree on a
> course of action :-).

AfD emphatically _does_ have discussions.  They are _not_ majority
votes.  If they are being closed as such by some, then fry those who
are closing incorrectly.  Wikipedia works by consensus.  Moving the
discussion to the talk page does precisely nothing to alter that.  AfD
is _not_ a majority vote.  (Incidentally, just to dispel a popular
myth, in the English language, vote != majority vote.  I do
distinguish between them.)

> > 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"?
> 
> 1.See everything I've written and the above link
> 2. Any deletion blanking would still have to be justified on the talk
> page as per the Deletion policy, and also indicated in the edit
> summary - if not, it would simply be reverted as vandalism.

1.  The only reason that I see is consistency.  That is not enough for
me to support a whole new approach to much of Wikipedia.
2.  OK, I'll take a slightly different tack.  Administrators are given
the power to delete articles because they are trusted.  People know
that they will not go and delete a little out-of-the-way page.  But
what is to stop a vandal or a troll from doing that?  We are given no
level of safety against this behaviour.

Bureaucracy may not be pretty.  It may not be democratic.  But I
firmly believe it is for the good of the encyclopaedia.

And that's the key.

Sam