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

Tue Sep 20 17:31:04 UTC 2005

A couple of days ago I was on the verge of taking this matter very 
seriously.

Then I looked at the net growth rate of the Wikipedia page count. Around 
1500 new pages per day remaining undeleted after seven days. I compared it 
to the sclerotic maximum capacity of Articles for Deletion (AfD) (average of 
112 listings per day early June to early September) and the fact that AfD 
participants complain bitterly about their inability to keep up with AfD at 
present.

Bottom line: AfD doesn't scale. Whatever problems may exist with AfD's 
tendency to randomly delete a selection of perfectly reasonable articles, 
and VFU's growing unwillingness to rectify this, the problem will decrease 
in significance in the long term as page creation rates accelerate 
inexorably beyond the reach of AfD, and possibly even any defensible 
extension of speedy deletion.

Perhaps requiring editors to sit a short examination on deletion policy 
would help to keep inappropriate nominations down and increase the overall 
capacity of AfD, but this would not address the problem of scale.

We should speedily delete obvious rubbish, and we do. In time this manual 
mechanism may be augmented by cooperative RC (recent changes) monitoring 
tools, which would improve our efficiency.

But AfD is already swamped by growth and this will only get worse. 
Correcting its strong exclusionist bias and restoring its connection with 
the deletion policy would not solve its fundamental brokenness.