On 9/16/05, Alphax <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Dan Grey wrote:
On 15/09/05, Alphax <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>Count the number of articles that go up to AFD
every day, and ask
>yourself if you think its reasonable that everyone write a paragraph
>- or even a short explanation - on everything they vote for. Simply
>*voting* on everything would take an hour a day at least.
Just to be clear, Ryan Delaney wrote that, not me.
I meant to respond to Ryan on this. As a AfD closer, I do expect all
participants in the debate to spend a few minutes, or whatever it takes,
reading the article, and then read the other comments in the debate, and
have a bit of a poke around the subject, possibly look at the article
history. If they're not doing at least the first two of those, they're not
making an informed comment. If I see them write a few words in the context
of the debate, I'm happier that there has been an informed discussion.
This evening I was privileged to spend two hours closing a discussion on the
proposed deletion of a minor book on a controversial subject. About fifty
people participated, so it took me a long time to perform my customary
backfground checks on the contributors. Debate was good-natured, given the
inflammatory subject matter, and the sense of serious engagement I got from
that debate made it a pleasure.
Had everybody just typed "keep/delete" there would have been two effects:
one or two people who originally voted redirect would not have changed their
votes to delete and redirect; three people would not have been convinced by
points and facts raised in the discussion and changed their vote from keep
to delete.
In short, it would not have been a *debate*.
I could have closed it in half the time (especially since there would have
been fewer radical edits towards the end by people who thought the
discussion was getting out of hand). But it would not have been right.