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

Tue Sep 20 17:40:10 UTC 2005

On Sep 20, 2005, at 1:31 PM, Tony Sidaway wrote:

>
> 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.
>

I agree wholeheartedly. Among other things, I think deletion policy  
is always going to have to be adaptive, because, like the blocking  
policy, stupid will always find new and previously unimagined ways to  
exist. Ultimately, the deletion policy, like the blocking policy,  
amounts to endless iterations of "Stop things that hurt Wikipedia  
without preventing anything beneficial to Wikipedia." Which is to  
say, we cannot sensibly connect the deletion policy to anything as a  
set of rigid rules, because all that will obtain is a system designed  
to be gamed.

AfD has two deeply seated problems.

1) It is unmanageably big, and will only get bigger.
2) The case for deletion can usually be made with a cursory look at  
the article. The case for inclusion often requires mildly substantive  
research using non-Wikipedia sources. Thus deletion is always going  
to be a fundamentally easier case to argue.

Thus it will always be the case that AfD becomes unmanageable, and  
that the unmanageability affects the exclusionists noticably less  
than the inclusionists.

-Snowspinner