[WikiEN-l] Wrongly deleted articles from AfD: List of power ballads

Thu Sep 15 16:39:15 UTC 2005

On 15/09/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> MacGyverMagic/Mgm writes:
> 
> 
> "Is there any article that was wrongly deleted within
> the past 3 days as a result of ignorance of the nominator or sheep
> voting by others without check the article and possible sources?"
> 
> Well it was hard searching, because of the way in which the AfD link gets
> screwed when an article is deleted.  So I stopped when I reached the first
> deletion that I think is rather dodgy.
> 
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_power_ballads

Erm, as you can plainly see it was me who did the deed on that one! It
must've been only the third or fourth AfD I've ever closed. So if you
think I've got it wrong, you know where the undelete link is :-)

Just to explain why I deleted that: despite everything I've said on
the list, I still feel a certain amount of responsibility to serve the
communty's will, not just impose my own (I would have voted keep).
However there were a lot of delete votes, one good keep vote, one guy
who wanted it copied to his user page (I thought we didn't allow
that), and one vote from an anon (although he made valid point).
Overall, I took that to be "rough consensus" for "delete".

Now, this is where I get confused. I've love to close and keep
listings like that which aren't actually falling foul of the Deletion
policy. However, I've heard that if you actually enforce that policy
you'll get flamed (see dpsmith's comments here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_policy#Notability_not_a_criterion_for_deletion.3F
). So I'm trying to find the fine line between not deleting silly
listings, but also not flagrantly denying the will of the community.

I'm very open to advice for doing this better :-).

Dan