On 9/16/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Usually the content of deletable articles isn't needed to create a
nice article/stub. If it is, temp undeletion or history undeletion
requests can be placed.
I've got some sympathy with that point of view. However I didn't have to
search long to find that list of power ballads case. That was a case where
deletion didn't make much sense; it just seems to have been a result of
failure of imagination on the part of those involved in the debate. As a
regular closer, I'd say this probably happens a lot more than you think.
Although I don't agree with everything Kelly says on the subject of AfD, and
I am actually one of AfD's greatest cheerleaders, there is a strong tendency
for people to congregate there whose views seem to be untempered by any
knowledge of deletion policy. For them "if in doubt, don't delete" sounds
like inclusionist claptrap rather than an accurate quote from the deletion
policy. For them, the lists of "Problems that don't require deletion" and
"Problems that may require deletion" might as well not exist. They'll ask
for deletion because an article is a mess, or because the content has POV
problems, or because it's deteriorated but was once good, or because the
subject does not merit an article (for which the remedy is of course a
merge) . There is a serious problem here, and saying "well we don't really
need that content, we can always rewrite it/temp undelete it/whatever" isn't
really an adequate defense for what is often a quite shocking miscarriage of
deletion policy.