[WikiEN-l] AfD Threshold being Revised Downward Again?

Tue Sep 20 15:52:45 UTC 2005

For those looking for your daily dose of VfD (Because, really, why  
pretend changing V to A changed anything) abuse, I submit for your  
amusement http://www.slate.com/id/2126570/entry/2126575/

Which is deleted at 60%, with one of the delete votes being very  
weak. When someone sensibly objected to deleting at 60%, which is  
considerably below the MINIMAL and highly disputed 2/3 threshold, and  
undeleted...

A delete/undelete war started.

Yes, there was a fairly conclusive VfU that said keep deleted. But as  
has been noted, VfU is exceedingly deferent to VfD, such that bad  
calls on VfD have no real recourse.

Adding to the problem is the fact that we're apparently adding a  
condition of extreme deference to the closing admin, which means that  
the final fate of articles is more or less being single-handedly  
decided by whether or not the closing admin happens to be of the 2/3  
flavor, the 60% flavor, the 75% flavor, the "I just delete what I  
feel like" flavor, or what.

If nothing else, we should accept that deletion will be handled like  
blocking, with objections to deletion being taken very seriously, and  
with admins being given a wide latitude to undelete what they see as  
bad closings.

To summarize, there are two key problems that NEED to be addressed,  
and that exist outside of whether one is an inclusionist, a  
deletionist, or a big blue frog.

1) AfD is simply too busy for the statement "Any good article that is  
nominated for AfD will be noticed by someone within five days" to be  
plausible, leading to a high probability that the generally  
deletionist tendencies on AfD will delete articles that, by most  
reasonable standards of the Wikipedia community at large, would be kept.

2) The closing procedures for AfD and subsequent appeals processes  
are heavily biased towards deletion, meaning that the only time that  
noticing and objecting to a good article being nominated is useful is  
in the first five days.

-Snowspinner